Lazy Sunday
by Laryna6
Summary: SO3 pregame. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, nor can you create a convincing cover identity without spending some time just hanging out with the people you're there to spy on. Or conspire with. Or apprentice, for that matter.
1. Sun's Day

_Disclaimer: I don't own Star Ocean or any related properties. No infringement intended or money made, please don't sue._

_The driving theme of all my Star Ocean pieces is going to be the question of that song by Joan Osborne, 'What if God was one of us?' I like concepts of how people deal with having power over others and what that responsibility entails._

_Some worldbuilding info:_

_In the 4d world, there are very few jobs, and those who have them are regarded as the lucky ones. Now, for a lot of people, jobs are not just a source of money. They're a source of identity and pride. People do not like to feel like they're useless, they want to stand out, make a difference. If their world is high-tech enough that it needs very few people to operate the infrastructure, and… hopeless enough about their prospects that they're not putting that energy into space travel, then there are going to be fights for those jobs, as we see in the game. The sensible thing to do would be to set up something like the Chinese civil service examinations (in the days of the empire) for eligibility to be hired._

_Luther is also quite young. As Blair also has a job, and not an insignificant one, that says a lot about them both. High intelligence that runs in the family is obvious, but to stand out among many competitors takes perseverance, ambition, a ton of hard work and a belief in oneself. The modest, let alone the shy and self-effacing, aren't going to make it. Think of it in terms of Job Interviewing for the Olympics, and then the kind of hyper competence you'd need to keep that job when there are always people gunning for it. Blair maybe be the 'nice' one of the two siblings but she still goes right on in there, spills secrets, hacks and generally betrays her brother all over the place. Nope, no modesty or second-guessing herself or if what she's doing is right there. Nor are there any hard feelings, because this kind of thing is normal._

_They're both Magnificent Bastard workaholics with very high opinions of themselves, because no other type of person could possibly get to where they are and stay there, not in their world. They are the kind of person that gets ahead. They may be nice people aside from that, but they are cutthroat entrepreneurs in a world where that's not only regarded as a good thing, but the highest social status there is. The people that others envy and read about in their equivalent of People magazine. Expecting Luther to be modest or dislike praise, even praising himself, is like expecting a shark to dislike water._

_Of course, it also takes the ability to assess yourself and your limits (because overstepping yourself looks bad), not to mention identifying talent and assessing the competition. One in a billion does not compare to one in a trillion. The Eternal Sphere has a much larger population and hence talent pool, and Dr. Leingod is _the _genius in symbology, who pulled something off that screwed the laws of physics._

* * *

"Two, two, three: Sophia, have we got at least seven eggs?" If not, they were going to have to improvise or he'd have to make another shopping run, depending.

"Let me see…" Sophia opened up the fridge. "There's ten."

"Great. Maybe you can make something for Fayt to take in for lunch on Monday, hmm? Or he might want two omelets. Bring them over here – remember to close the fridge, it's wrong to waste anything, even if solar power is cheap – and did your dad give you permission to use the knives?"

"…I didn't ask," she confessed, as she put the egg carton down on the counter next to him.

"Well, what he doesn't know won't hurt him. I suppose being overprotective to compensate isn't as bad as not being protective at all, but it still must be really annoying for you. Try to forgive your dad, he is trying."

"I wish…"

"Well, you are." He shrugged. "Well: want to start washing the vegetables I brought while I cook the bacon?" The Esteeds rarely cooked: Sophia wanted to learn, but her father, like Fayt's was almost always at the university. Bacon and eggs were about the extent of what he could cook, not counting macaroni and cheese and the other staples of starving grad students everywhere. Sophia had grown up going to one of the nearby restaurants that served college students, the cafeteria, or ordering in with her parents, if not TV dinners.

Given the number of times she'd had to think fast to come up with something to eat that wasn't cereal, when they'd only come home after dark and not told her in advance or left any cash, why were they so surprised that she wanted to learn how to cook for herself? _Everyone _should know how to cook. He could generally count on finding milk, bread, cheese, bacon and eggs and a few staples here, but anything else had to bring himself. At least Dr. Esteed had insisted on reimbursing him.

It made him feel like a paid shopper sometimes, but there was nothing wrong with an honest day's work.

"Sure!" Sophia said cheerfully, and a normal Sunday morning resumed as she started pulling things out of the bags.

Once the bacon was sizzling, he pulled out the built-in cutting board and got down the block that held the vegetable and other knives. Sophia got a little worried when she couldn't find the potato peeler or cheese grater, but it turned out that they were still stuck in the back of the dishwasher from two weeks ago.

"You should probably just take over running the dishwasher," he advised her as he quickly washed them in the sink.

"It makes him feel like he isn't a very good father when I do his chores."

"Well, they need to get done. Just use that to extort a bigger allowance out of him," he advised.

"I tried, but he said that I'm his daughter, not his maid."

"Then he should hire a maid. I draw the line at cleaning up any messes I didn't make," although, technically… And, man, was that ever an arrogant thing to say. Too good for honest work? "But there are plenty of other grad students that would kill to work for a professor like him."

"It's really nice of you to come by on Sundays."

He shrugged. "It's a nice break and I'm getting paid for it. Not to mention that I have all the time in the world, and do you know how good it looks to have Drs. Esteed and _Leingod_ sponsoring me?" He was as good as tenured faculty already.

Of course Sophia knew that some of the people on campus who were nice to them weren't only doing it to be nice.

"But an hour here is an hour, right?"

"Yes, but I can't just disappear when nothing interesting is going on." That would be a little obvious. "And this is fun. I like cooking, and I can't do it at home anymore. Not for other people."

"Why not?"

"It's rude." He sighed. "Like stuffing your face when there are starving people. Cooking for yourself is a productive way to kill time. Cooking for the benefit of other people is productive _work_, and I have an actual job. I actually didn't get to cook that much when I was a kid, because our parents had hopes for Blair and I." It was study, study, study to pass the Exams. "There is no higher endeavor than doing something that makes other people happy, and everyone likes good cooking. That's probably why I went into art instead of archiving." What they still called research, here.

"Dad says that cooking and cleaning were considered women's work, and that if I do them people will think that I don't have any self-esteem or that he's using me to do all the chores," Sophia said, watching the knife carefully as she cut the peppers into the right size pieces.

"They're perfectly respectable work. Cooking is the only work a lot of people have, since we have robots for cleaning," he told her. "Although there's a huge market for breakable, delicate artwork and plants that people have to take care of… Anyway, it's your time. Do what makes you happy with it. Why do you think people come here? Everyone wants to make a difference, to have actually accomplished something in their life that they'll be remembered for. And they don't just come here for the exciting things. There's a lot more to stopping wars or running countries than just beating people up. You have to invest a lot of hours in a character that's more than a knight errant. You have to be there if there's an emergency in the middle of the night. You have to do paperwork. A lot of people don't do much more than settle down as a smith somewhere and make things. Just not labor-saving devices." He smiled wryly. "If Dr. Leingod was actually trying to identify us, if he had any idea that we'd be ordinary people, not just mythic figures, that would probably be the best way to go about it." Roleplaying was roleplaying, but there were some things that were cultural.

Most people in the Eternal Sphere thought of work as work. Boring, backbreaking, when they'd rather have the leisure time to do something fun. All they'd have to do was look for people who got irritated by the implication that someone else was too good for honest work, among a few other things… People might come to the Eternal Sphere to ignore ordinary morals often enough, but another reason was to be able to express their emotions and achieve their desires, meaning that roleplaying aside, 4d people rarely bothered to hide it here when something _really _made them mad.

That was another thing that had become part of the culture in the worlds of the Sphere that he liked. People were genuinely more honest about their emotions here.

Although the fact that it had become normal and acceptable to name your kids things like Fayt Leingod… Some troll had used the name Leeroy Jenkins while acting as befitted a legendary hero, just for the lulz that would result from future generations naming their kids that and using it as a battle cry.

Well, that was better than the ones who abused those around them, but the people of the Sphere had criminals anyway. It wasn't like he hadn't given the NPCs means to fight back.

In fact, it turned out he'd given them _too much _potential ability to fight back, but it was really only fair.

The trouble came when it came down to MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Like back in the Cold War days, centuries ago.

"It's strange, to think of a world where people don't have to work. I mean, I know about job applications, and how there's competition and some people have a hard time finding jobs. It makes sense that if there weren't many jobs at all and lots of people that most people would be out of work. And I hate feeling useless."

He winced. "You're far from useless, Sophia."

"But Fayt thinks of games as, well, games. They're a break from work. Or studying, anyway."

"Fayt has a bright future ahead of him. You too. You have so many possibilities open to you."

"Thank you," she said, pausing in her work to look up at him, admiration and thanks in her eyes, and this was one of those countless moments that made it all worthwhile.

Dr. Esteed was insane to miss out on mornings like this, but then, people who had it this good didn't know how good they had it. "The pleasure's all mine. It's nice to play god and be told that I'm winning." By the people he'd created as well as the countless happy players and their fan mail. Even their griping was kind of nice, since the ridiculousness of a lot of their complaints just underscored how high their standards were. How high he'd made them, how close the Eternal Sphere was to everything they'd wished for.

As well as what he'd wished for.

He'd finished peeling the potatoes when she finally asked him, "Are you really not going to have children of your own?"

"Sophia, you wouldn't want to be my real daughter. I'd have to neglect you all the time, the way _your _dad does, because I'd have the rest of the Sphere to look after, too. You can't blame him too much for being gone when he's trying to save your life." Once the experiments had stopped, he'd started spending almost no time with her. It was obvious that it was a combination of work and avoiding her because he felt guilty, but this wasn't the way to make it up to her. Not that he could tell the man that, since he wasn't supposed to know about those little experiments.

"I don't, but…"

"It's too late, anyway. I gave away both my child allowances _and _the extra one I was awarded for creating the Eternal Sphere and making so many people's lives better. It was only fair: I've got trillions of kids, and almost everyone else can only have two. I'm already being obscenely greedy about it." Time to flip the bacon. Maybe he should buy a second frying pan? This was a little ridiculous. On the other hand, it meant time to talk. "Raising children is something else that makes a difference. That lets you be remembered." Even if only by them. "Actually, a lot of people with jobs don't have kids. It cuts down on how much people hate you, if only a bit." If you were paying for your success by sacrificing your other legacy.

"They don't hate you." Sophia could never imagine hating anyone. That was the real power of her gene, to understand people, and it was hard to hate someone when you knew why they were doing everything. Although that didn't mean she couldn't hate what they were doing.

"A lot of them do. I'm the most famous person in the world. What I do makes more difference to more people than practically anyone else. Everyone wants to be needed, everyone wants to matter, to not be just another statistic. And then there are people who only care about power and being important. I've got a few of those in my company. Blair says I should sack them and give the positions to the deserving, but they're a good way to study that type of person." Keep an eye on public opinion; try to find outlets for them in the Sphere.

Every so often, someone _would _try to rally the unsatisfied and try a coup, try to smash all technology, let billions who couldn't be supported without it die and go back to kneeling in the mud since they were power-hungry and the people were bored and didn't know how good they had it. He often had fights with the UN over keeping activities in the Eternal Sphere anonymous since they wanted to know who might be using their characters to study how to pull off revolutions.

Thank goodness, actually: if it weren't for the freedom to privacy issues with data monitoring, he would _never _have been able to hide that they'd evolved real sapience as long as he had.

Getting to see real people in the Sphere, dealing with real poverty (although he tried to keep the reincarnation system balanced so it got made up for) generally taught them a bit of compassion. It encouraged them to make a difference for those people by defeating monsters, stopping bandits and warlords… fear of AI aside, he thought that most people wouldn't mind that the Sphere's people were sentient. It was a wonderful surprise, to find that no; you hadn't been _playing _at being a hero.

"That's smart."

"Eh, probably not. I hope they don't try to stab me in the back at _too _inconvenient a time, but if I replaced them, then I'd have to figure out which of the new people were reporting to the government." On top of their own ambitions and the fact that if he was brought down, someone could step into his shoes. "Better the traitor you know. Not that you'll have to worry about that."

"I shouldn't use it that way."

"Sophia, it's a talent. You're good with people. Connection may have made you predisposed to it, but it's not your fault you can't turn off the telempathy." It was actually his fault that he'd made her consciously aware of it trying to figure out what she could do. "You're also a lot better at symbology than most people. Sure, it's an unfair genetic advantage, but so is perfect pitch. As long as you care about the people around you, as long as you try not to abuse that power, you probably won't." It wasn't like life was fair.

"If you say so."

She'd been made this way, abused like this, to help kill him, and she trusted him. She looked to him as an example of being responsible with great power. She believed in him and wasn't afraid of the impending doom of her universe because she trusted him. She was sure that he could pull this off.

Which was why he was never going to tell her that he'd already set up a cover id for her and, if all else failed, she'd be going into hiding in his world with Blair. Obviously he hadn't asked Blair about it, none of this had a prayer of working if she didn't believe that he was on the side of their world, but if it came down to it, he was going to dump a note and a kid on her. Luckily, if things went that badly he'd be too dead for her to yell at him. The good part of Blair being so, so… unthinkingly decent was that she'd actually do it instead of being sensible and turning Sophia in. He knew how to tug on her heartstrings; she wouldn't be able to do that to her one remaining niece.

Thankfully, he'd been able to feign sympathy with a few of the revolutionary groups that used the Sphere to meet and practice. They should be able to hide both of them.

He wished he could do the same for Fayt and Maria, at least, but they didn't have Connection. They wouldn't be able to absorb the culture they way she could. It would be possible for people to suspect them, when it was impossible to see Sophia as anything but family. Trying to save them too would put Blair and Sophia in danger.

No: it was success or failure, there wasn't a middle ground. Trying to make failure less bad, trying to make sure that even a single life would be saved, was stupid. He needed to focus everything he had on making this work.

One more sign he was a human instead of a god… "Sophia, do you want to see if you can do the whole thing by yourself?" He moved over at the stove to make room.

Really? "I start by cracking the eggs on the rim of the bowl." Right?

"That's right." He handed her two. They'd start with his omelet, just in case anything went wrong.

"Do you know if Dad will be coming home today?"

"Not barring an emergency: he was telling the truth when he said this was something he couldn't get out of." Making a classified report with Dr. Leingod. "Officially he's off at eleven pm. I doubt he'll be home before three. A lot of people came from out-system for this." They'd want to catch up.

"Oh."

"Well, it means we can speak a little more freely than we usually can." Sophia was a child, and children made slips, so he'd written programs to make sure that if she said his real name people would hear his character's name and so on. "And Fayt will be coming by as soon as he rolls out of bed and gets ready. I don't know if his mother will drop him off or I'll have to go over and pick him up."

There was a saying that people wanted to give their children the things they hadn't had, but he had spent Sunday mornings like this with Blair and the tutor their parents had hired when he was a kid. This would be more of a proper family thing if he could tell Blair what he was really up to, if she could be here and show Sophia how to make crepes and those other sweet things she was fond of, but that just wasn't safe. If he got found out, he'd be a traitor to his world, to his _species, _and if Blair had known, was a collaborator instead of an idealist who was against killing she believed was needless?

Then she'd be just as dead as she'd be if she went on the run with Sophia and got caught, but there wouldn't be anything to show for it.

"Can I come with you?"

"Sure, why not. We'll walk; it's only a mile and a half." That was a nice thing about living around a university, there was a lot of stuff in walking distance. "How did your homework go?"

"I couldn't figure out how to get my bird to flap her wings. Well, I could make her move but it didn't look natural at all." She'd looked up videos of real canaries.

"Sophia, the assignment was just to try to make a three-d model." Well… why not. "I'll start showing you the basics of how animation works this afternoon. I was going to cover a few more computer graphics tricks, but we should do what you're interested in." And apparently she wanted to make her bird really fly instead of just making it pretty.

"Three-d… Oh! Animation is change over time. That's the fourth dimension."

"Exactly. Not that this world isn't four-dimensional too, it's just that we can enter it at any point."

She nodded, carefully pouring the mixed-up eggs into the frying pan. "And so can I, if I go to your world and come back in."

"It's the same thing as arriving at a different point in space. Time is a dimension just like the other three." Surely all nine year olds weren't this brilliant. Of course, most nine-year-olds hadn't been immersed in symbology and other computer languages their entire lives. Not to mention that connection had let her absorb a lot of knowledge from not just him but her father and Dr. Leingod. She might not know it consciously, but it meant she didn't have to work to get her head around the difficult concepts and she could skip a lot of the tedious memorization.

"But I can only go into your world in the times that the Eternal Sphere exists there." And Luther had banned her from going anywhere near the final months. Not until the time came. Not while she was still learning. Not when it would be so incredibly difficult to pull off, even with all the advance notice that came from the mysterious appearance of a six-year-old in his office when he'd turned the prototype on the first time to do some beta testing before he showed it to anyone. Thankfully, she'd managed to put herself back in the instant she disappeared, because _he _certainly hadn't had any idea of what had just happened or how it worked at that point.

The message from the Time Gate must have come from the future of his own world. He certainly hadn't made it yet, and he wouldn't unless he had to. Unless he were being pressured. Unless there wasn't a lot of his own world's time left.

"That's probably a good sign. It hopefully means that we really can separate the two worlds." There had to be a difference between severing a connection and nothing left of either or both but wreckage.

Or so he hoped.

"Do you really think that I could make my own world someday?"

"Yes." Of course. He'd done it, and he didn't have powers the way she did. "If you want to," he amended that. "It's a big responsibility, remember."

"I know."

"And didn't you want to be in the circus when we first met? You can use computer animation to make movies, too. Modeling is useful for science; computers in general are useful for anything: just… do what you want, ok?"

"I know, and don't forget to play. You're like grandpa sometimes."

"In _my _world, if you even want a _prayer _of achieving your dreams, you have to studystudystudy, because there are only so many jobs and billions of people who want them." He laughed. "My tutor would go over formulae and history with us when while we did this."

"What should I put in?"

"Hmm, I'll leave it up to you." Yet another nice thing about programming a universe was that you could make everything taste great. That didn't keep incompetent cooks from rendering even the best ingredients inedible, but Sophia was doing well.

"Ok!" That made her cheer up, but then she frowned again.

"You really have been saving up questions. Go ahead."

"What age are you now?"

"I'm not going to die anytime soon, Sophia."

"But you've been spending hours and hours. In class, at the lab, being a TA…" And even though he could reenter this world at any time, he had stuff to do in the outside world. How many years had passed in his world in the three years she'd known him?"

"They think I'm writing out dialogue trees and working on the AI. It would take a lot of work to make all of you seem to be what you actually are. You're not only saving me a ton of time, but you're giving me an excuse to hang out in here all I want and say I'm getting work done. Which I am," of course. He'd _never _skip out on work. "And having a long-running character is great for testing out the player experience. I'm not wasting time by being here, and this should probably be over before I get any grey hairs. Since we can't have magic or space travel," or an afterlife, as far as they knew, "making people live longer is the thing that most of our scientific talent concentrates on." He frowned. "What brought this on?"

"My father is…" She looked around before announcing in a stage whisper, "He's _dyeing his hair_. And he doesn't want to walk anywhere anymore."

"Your father isn't _old _Sophia. He may not be as young as Dr. Leingod," who was a genius prodigy that Luther freely admitted was smarter than he was, "but he's not going to die anytime soon."

"…Promise?"

"I promise." If Dr. Esteed got hit by a bus, he'd alter things so that he was never there. It was simple enough to perform 'miracles' like that.

The only thing he _couldn't _fix was anything Fayt used his power on. Fortunately, while Sophia's personality meant that she was using Connection almost constantly, Fayt was responsible enough to subconsciously lock down Destruction. It had been _very _hard for Dr. Leingod to drug or provoke him into using it in the tests.

"Thank you."

"Don't feel guilty about asking me for favors. I'm not doing _all _of this out of the goodness of my heart."

"You're trying to learn about the plan to attack your world and show Fayt and I, and our fathers, that you aren't a bad person, so they'll trust you if you need to ask for their help in order to make it work. But you're still doing all this to save everyone."

He rolled his eyes. "Never mind that as the creator of the Eternal Sphere I have fame, fortune, the adoration of the people…" Not to mention a large number of women who were willing to put up with the fact that he had to spend his time and emotional energy on the Sphere instead of relationships. In fact, a lot of them admired his work ethic. "It's not like I'm making any sacrifices."

"But you will."

He paused, and watched the water pour over his hands and the cutting board he was washing it, mind automatically noting the realism without really seeing it. "Can't hide anything from you, can I." No one could, if she cared enough to look. "I'll either have to say goodbye to this world or goodbye to Blair."

"Just Blair?"

"If I liked my world, would I have created this one? There's no magic there anymore. All the 'here be dragons' were filled in centuries before I was born. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be, and I'd have to spend the rest of my life afraid that I'd failed and something had happened to all of you. I'd have nothing to do _but _worry." He'd have to sacrifice his reputation and lose his job. He shook his head and resumed scrubbing. "It's not a sacrifice to put so much energy into playing this identity when it may become my 'real' one someday."

This was entirely too depressing a conversation for such a nice Sunday morning.

"Not to mention that if I can figure out how they got your powers to work there, then maybe I can leave my world that knowledge. They could finally have the stars." Connection could connect two spaces together, creating wormholes. Alteration could speed up terraforming: countless possibilities.

"Would you stay there, then?"

"I'm a game designer: what do I know about aerospace?" More than all but a handful of people in his world, actually. "Even though I _wrote _this universe's laws of physics, some of what Dr. Leingod says in his books _still _goes way over my head." And he had to work to get much of the rest. "No, I've already done enough. I should leave that to other people." So they would have a chance to make a difference, to go down in history.

Of course, they'd still owe it all to him, and know it, too.

It was _very _hard to be a god without being a megalomaniac.

Dr. Leingod was a genius, but Dr. Leingod wouldn't exist without him. Nor would Sophia, or Fayt, or countless other people, worlds upon worlds of them.

"Oh for crying out loud, I'm turning into my parents." Taking credit for the accomplishments of his children. On the other hand, they did deserve the credit for making it possible, in the same way his programs made all this possible.

"Do people really do that?" Sophia didn't want to be like hers.

"In some ways, I think it's inevitable." Both nature and nurture. "But sentient beings have _some _ability to get around our programming, thankfully." Fifteen more seconds and he was going to have to nudge her to keep a closer eye on the omelet before it got overcooked. Luckily she followed his thoughtful gaze and saw that it was done instead of ruined somehow.

They ended up splitting it, so they wouldn't be too hungry if they had to walk over to Fayt's. Fortunately, his mother was able to drop him off, and since she'd done it earlier it was easy to nudge Sophia into showing him that she could make them all by herself, which he thought was awesome and wanted to learn how to do too. Fayt was the kind of boy who liked making things, but when left to his own devices he'd toss stuff together to see what happened, which rarely resulted in anything edible.

After assuring Sophia that he trusted her not to destroy the kitchen teaching Fayt how to cook, he was able to head to the kitchen table and pull open his notes. Dissertation and promised position aside, academia here was publish or perish – even if the competition was much, much less cutthroat than in his own world – and he needed to make himself a reputation if he was going to be able to do this with the minimum of contrived coincidences, even if his ability to alter space-time meant he could contrive them what amounted to centuries in advance.

There was also the option of benefitting from coincidences that other people had contrived, or had been set up for plot reasons. For instance, an Expellian character with symbology in their DNA had a bit of trouble operating on Earth (what with potentially having what amounted to the firepower of a small tank), but that itself had gotten him a bit of notoriety. Dr. Esteed had been worried about what would happen when his daughter found out that she had symbology in her DNA, since those people were generally considered dangerous, and given the choice between the top grad students, he'd chosen to mentor the one that he could use to show his daughter that no, she wasn't a dangerous monster or anything like that. It would have been even easier to get this job if he'd designed a female character, but he didn't want to end up actually living as a woman.

Although that _would _have made it impossible for anyone (Blair) to guess that this was him…

Maybe he should create a second character. Maybe. It wasn't like he could have this one meet Maria without eyebrows being raised. The researchers knew what would happen, to themselves, their children and the world if the Federation found out about their project. He couldn't risk being too nosy.

It would only be trouble if there was some attempt to get his two characters in the same place at the same time, and it was a big universe. Even in the endgame, he could probably find an excuse to be elsewhere. Actually, since a lot of stuff would be going on then, it might be handy to have a spare identity that he could run around putting out fires with.

Brown hair, eyes that weren't any particularly interesting color, named Ashton Fords after one of the heroes instead of something original: he'd made this character lack as many of the things that normally marked a PC as he could without that itself being suspicious. It was normal in this universe to stand out. Sure, pointed ears, but they were a racial characteristic. He could probably be a lot less forgettable with the alternate account. He certainly wouldn't want them to seem like they shared a theme.

Given the setting… Krausian. That generally implied blond, which was his own hair color, but meh, normal was normal. If he wanted to do the cheap route, he could have her be related to someone Maria knew (or would eventually meet). Heck, given that the scientists had all theme-named their kids, having an appropriate name would just be fitting in. Nothing religious, of course. Krausians tended towards names relevant to their worlds' environment: Oasis would indicate a helpful character. Actually, it wouldn't be too bad if they figured out that character was a PC. If he knew his players, other PCs would be doing anything they could to help, so he could even give this character a name that hinted she wasn't real. Maybe 'Mirage' might work?

* * *

_It is rather common for male players to create female characters in MMORPGs. It's not regarded as cross-dressing, and some people actually consider it the straighter option, because if you're going to be looking at someone for hours upon end… Also, Mirage, in her ending with Fayt, makes some rather pointed comments about someone losing their old world/life, having to deal with going to a new one, etc._

_The idea that some denizens of 4-d might end up staying in the Eternal Sphere is interesting in terms of Nel's ending, where another character says that she's doing all she can to help Aquaria because she's old and her time is running out, and as good as says that she's from 4-d, she loves this world, and does Nell have a problem with that?_


	2. Moon's Day

_Mirage being a 'created' character is partially an in-joke, given her status as an optional & her moveset/equips. She was basically added in later, and this fic makes that literal. I find messing with gameplay/story segregation fun._

_In case anyone's wondering, I'm not going to ship Fayt/Sophia in this. They always seemed more like brother and sister than boyfriend and girlfriend to me. While Luther is encouraging them to bond, he's doing that because he sees himself and Blair in them. He's kind of pushing them to grow closer as siblings because he's going to have to push Blair away, and that's making him realize how precious a relationship like that with your family is. The idea of them dating would weird him out, and they're probably going to pick up that attitude. There are types of love other than romantic, after all._

_The fic is a slight AU anyway, so I'll elaborate a bit on Maria:_

_Her mother took her and went into the back of beyond, where there were shady groups and the Federation wasn't paying much attention. Because of that, she was able to tell Maria about her powers and force her to try to gain some conscious control over them._

_The testing of Fayt and Sophia, by contrast, was more scientific due to better equipment, but mainly consisted of verifying that they actually did have such powers. Small children are not the best at keeping secrets and the Federation was obviously keeping an eye on those families for their own protection: Robert Leingod was all kinds of valuable. They would have been at some risk even without the genes._

_The idea was that Maria would end up with actual control over her powers, and could then teach Fayt and Sophia when the time came. Of course, if anything went wrong, the two important genes, as far as they knew, were Connection and Destruction, the ones they'd need to get to the Creator's weird higher dimension and kill him/it. When the fate of the universe is at stake, sadly, individuals are expendable and Alteration was kind of a 'Johnny of all trades' backup/pinch hitter, not one of the vital ones. Better the stunt double messing up and killing herself than the star._

_You may have noticed that what is said here about how she met Cliff and so on isn't in line with the game. Of course, Maria's backstory is subject to change (especially changes that would conveniently bring it in line with canon by gametime). Alteration gene, after all. I wanted to play with that gene, and the ability to alter your own life history is an interesting thought. Maria doesn't so much have a backstory as backstories. A multiple choices past. She's an unhappy person with the ability to play god and try to fix her life, except when she forgets she can. There are limits, on her power, however, like making an alteration that would keep her from ever having the power to make that alteration. Of course, her power was made to kill, so it's possible for her to kill herself with it like that, it's just she would instinctively pull back from doing so, in the way it's actually close to impossible for a human being to slit their own throat._

_Try to imagine that your finger is a knife and even pretend to do it. Freaky, huh? Instinct is interesting._

_This chapter is just slices of life like the last one, really. The theme is Monday-Moonday, hence the first scene taking place at night and focus on supportive female characters. Not to mention Mirage's themes. Has anyone here read _Eight Days of Luke_ by Diana Wynne Jones?_

_On Sunday, the Creator, on Moonday, masks and illusions (but ones that give life, not ones meant to decieve and harm)… I'm not using Sophia or Maria for the Moon/Moonday, because the Moon just reflects the sun's light, the way Mirage was meant to be a mask for the Creator's benevolence. The moon is not the equal of the sun, in astronomical terms, although it does have quite a lot of effect on human life, via tides, and the fact it's closer would also have fit with Sophia. I've already decided who gets which chapters. Blaire on Thursday is amazingly appropriate, although that's half a _Matantei Loki Ragnarok_ reference._

_Disclaimer: I don't own anything, TriAce and such do._

* * *

After the military driver dropped him off (these things always had good wine, for whatever reason), he was tipsy enough to fumble with his keys for a bit before remembering that, right, it was after midnight, he wouldn't leave Sophia alone this late without a babysitter (not when he had valuable military secrets and she was a kidnap risk), and Ashton always sat at the table in the living room near the door so that he could hear anyone knocking.

Luckily Ashton had keen enough ears (not that he was the sort who made ear jokes about Expellians) to have picked up someone trying (and failing) to open the door. It swung open just as he was about to knock.

"You just opened the door after midnight without checking who it was?"

"Your minder called to let me know that you were being driven home."

Right, he'd asked them to.

"And," Ashton added as he took his briefcase and ushered him in. "You'd be amazed by the kind of intimidation factor Expellians have."

Right, it _would _be kind of like opening a door to find that your intended robbery victim was carrying a loaded gun.

"Anyone who would keep trying after seeing these," his ears, "wouldn't have been stopped by a locked door in any case."

"Good point." That was one of the three reasons that he'd hired Ashton. If he'd hired a bodyguard that might have made people assume that he had some reason to expect people to go after his daughter. It was as good as announcing that she was a valuable hostage. Surrounding her with dangerous people, on the other hand? The symbology faculty was generally known to be dangerous when they put their minds to it. It was easy to get the license to have symbols placed on your body when you had a good reason to want them, like research. Security clearances also helped.

"Coffee?"

"It's…" He looked at the clock. "Almost four AM."

Ashton waited for him to explain the apparent non sequitor.

Right, this was a soon-to-be-ex grad student. "I'm not getting any younger," he admitted, sitting down at the table that Ashton had covered with papers, the way he did any work surface he was given access to.

"You probably shouldn't mention that in front of Sophia. It worried her."

"She should probably get used to the idea, so it doesn't come as a shock later." He'd had a long time to get used to the idea that he was doomed. The question was whether or not _anything_ could be saved. "What are you working on?"

"The Grant Proposal." What else?

"Oh, That Grant Proposal." With the capital letters. He chuckled. "Let me know if you ever get anyone to actually fund it."

"It's plausible. Both of you said that you'd back me on it, in exchange for access to it."

"We can't stick our necks out too far." Funding a trip to capture a minor deity to interview as a primary source in order to study these entities and their relationship to symbology? "It's a fantastic idea. They exist, they've been defeated in combat, but no one's ever tried anything like this before."

"Physics, symbology: they're all studies of the fundamental reality of our world, but there is a third area of study that, as yet, no one has truly attempted to apply the scientific method to…"

"Yes, yes, I've heard it before, remember." He chuckled. "If it works, you're really going to make a name for yourself."

"Compared to what most cutting-edge research costs these days, this would be pocket change. Superstition aside, it should be a lot easier for a sponsor to give someone trying to make a name for themselves this sort of money as opposed to Dr. Leingod's budget."

"Clever." Ambitious young man, not that there was anything wrong with that. He clearly had a passion for research, and in order to do research you needed backing, that was how it worked.

That was what they'd done, by going to study the Time Gate…

"Actually, I have some things to review for tomorrow."

Ashton started putting his papers away with rubber bands and practiced, organized movements. He was good at packing them up and spreading them out again. "Do you want me to cover for you? Until when?"

"…do you think you'd be up to taking the nine-o-clock lecture?"

"…can I fudge it by just doing practical demonstrations of the course material?" To wow the undergrads.

"It certainly wouldn't hurt your popularity." Although he had already been given a faculty position anyway, it couldn't hurt to be well-liked by the students.

"That works." He stretched. "I'll get going, then."

"Are you actually going to go to sleep?"

"No." Of course not. Sleep was for the weak and humanities majors.

"…What did you make and is there any left over?"

"I made nothing. Well, some bacon and I chopped some stuff up." Sophia wasn't allowed to use the real knives. "Sophia and Fayt made omelets, grilled cheese, a salad and chocolate shakes. There's some shake left." The receipt would be in the usual place.

The sugar might help. "Stay and pour me some of that shake? Is there anything you want me to look over?"

"I wasn't doing anything really groundbreaking today. Just editing a couple papers and The Grant Proposal. I don't mind hanging around, though."

Dr. Esteed opened his briefcase, Ashton turned on his datapad so he didn't use all the space on the table again. It wasn't done to look over people's shoulders when they were on a computer, but his guess was that Ashton was taking a break to just fool around online instead of anything serious. It always got a little lonely in the summers, when his wife went on her vacations (he always meant to attend, but…) and the normal flock of students had decreased to the ones who lived too far away to go home for causal trips and the commuters.

He liked this apartment, and appreciated the soundproofing, but after spending the best years of his life in the dorms and or on research trips living in close quarters, often it was too quiet.

Then, suddenly Ashton burst out laughing. "Are you kidding me? Someone like that actually exists. And is a wanted terrorist."

"Oh?"

"You know the old game where you create a profile and search the dating sites with it to see if they exist?" With trillions of people, there was almost certain to be someone with just about any given name and tons of people created profiles and never got around to deleting them.

"Hmm… What is your type? Female, into some form of self defense…"

"I don't like dating people I intimidate." And Expellians were fairly intimidating. "Krausian woman, about my age, blond, practices some form of self-defense on the expert level, well-traveled, into some kind of noble cause, related to someone borderline newsworthy, first name Mirage."

"Why Mirage?"

"Because I wasn't expecting someone like that to exist?" Krausians weren't the largest race, and just because there was fairly certain to be _some _Krausian with that first name didn't mean that there would be one that fit the rest of the criteria. "Mirage Kroas. Sadly, her dating profile says she's not single. I… don't think she created this account for herself." That was an understatement. "She's a member of Quark." Or she would be.

"Well, there would go your security clearance."

Ashton sighed. "She's a practitioner of a hereditary martial arts style. She champions the voiceless, she's got ambition to change the world in spades, she'd make great company on research expeditions, and if I dated her, I wouldn't be able to go on any of those."

"You'll live."

He shrugged theatrically, chuckling under his breath as he closed his datapad and stuck it in his bag. "I should head home so I can put on something appropriate for heading a class before I hit the labs."

"The labs? What time are you heading in today?"

"Five am."

"…I'm sorry. I wouldn't have asked you to watch her today if I'd known." Well, if he'd known that he was coming home this late, anyway.

"Someone had to watch her, and I got a lot done. Sleep is for the weak, anyway." He waved goodbye as he headed out the door.

Then the cheerful expression vanished.

Either Sophia's powers were acting up again and his idea for someone that could get close to Maria without suspicion had been based on subconscious knowledge of exactly who fit that profile, or something temporal was going on and the character already existed even though he hadn't made her yet.

_That _was going to cause headaches, either way.

* * *

"Luther?" Blair peered into his Workspace.

He held up a hand. "Can't talk. Debugging."

She wandered over, curious as to what would take up his full attention like this, not to mention that why he would put up the marker on the door that said he was in/available when he was allegedly trying to concentrate? He was going over the logged records of his own actions? "What happened?"

"Either someone hacked my admin account, time travel exists outside of the Eternal Sphere or something _really _weird is going on." He'd been thinking that if a character like this Mirage didn't exist, he'd have to invent her, and according to this, he _had_. Created not just a character but a _person_ and inserted her years before Sophia's 'present.' And, according to the timestamp, he had done that this morning, his time, which was _when he'd had the idea_ of making a character like that. Except obviously he couldn't become her now, he wouldn't kill and replace a real person.

Blair stood behind his chair, tapping her foot. "I _told _you that you should just use the controls everyone else uses instead of hooking your neural net into the Eternal Sphere." Although those units _were _selling like hotcakes. Full immersive virtual reality, as opposed to looking at a screen?

"I have surge protectors."

"You also have a very vivid, not to mention overactive imagination and you've customized this system to work with how you think. When you drew up that character profile, you thought of it in terms of what keywords you'd give the system to have it generate one for you, didn't you? And since you were already hooked into the system, and your whim is the Eternal Sphere's command…"

Now, he paused, and turned around to look at her. "How did you know that I was drawing up a character?"

His notes were spread out all over, and even though they were in code, "…It used to be _our _scribble-language, remember." They barely used it anymore, even though they were at the top now, and they'd thought that was when it would be the most useful to have a language no one knew. They barely used it anymore, and Luther kept adding more and more symbols and never even offered to tell her what they meant.

His poker face was still up. "I'll keep that in mind," he said, before turning back to the console.

Hadn't she done everything she could to make it clear that they weren't rivals? What had happened? She didn't _want _the leadership. The credit for the Eternal Sphere was his, and she would study it. The virtual reality, the AI, how interacting with it changed people… She'd already written books, she was already an authority on several things, one of the few people in the world doing actual research that wasn't medical. She was one of the few people in the world who didn't _want _what he had, didn't he know that anymore?

She couldn't ask what was wrong, not when he might suspect that she wasn't his friend. Trying to get him to expose a weakness would just confirm any suspicions he had. "There's no proof that dying in a dream can kill you in real life, but it's possible that it's actually the Eternal Sphere that has to worry about your subconscious, not the other way around."

"I actually did set it up to execute some commands when I thought them. It would be rather odd for one of my characters to start reciting ritual symbology language in the middle of a conversation whenever I had an idea," he admitted, as something of a peace offering. "But I didn't give the signal to start listening for that."

"Maybe there's a bug in the on/off switch for the mental programming system?"

"That's a lot more likely than the alternatives," he admitted. When a change was made to the Eternal Sphere at a certain point in time, it would affect the Sphere from that point on. For instance, arranging for Mirage Kroas to be born had caused her to exist in the time he'd currently been in, after having lived through the intervening years. However, from the perspective of his world, Mirage should have started existing yesterday morning. Until then, a player could have visited Kraus or joined Quark and she would not have been there.

Or they shouldn't have found her there. She shouldn't have existed yet.

_Sophia _was able to make changes to the Eternal Sphere that became retroactive and even affected the records of how the Sphere had been, affecting the past and present of his world as easily as her own. Maria and Fayt should have the same capability, not that he'd dared experiment with the powers of those two. Fayt could destroy not just objects themselves but all the records of them, all evidence they'd ever existed and all the backup data that could have been used to restore them. Potentially.

Of course, an AI changing the past was theoretically impossible, but so was an AI just materializing in the real world, completely ignoring the conservation of matter and energy.

The trouble with the theory that this was nothing more than a simple error on his part was that according to these records Mirage Kroas had been programmed in yesterday, at the exact moment when he thought her up, and yet, according to the backups he'd pulled, she had existed before that point.

He couldn't blame everything on Sophia. Making the mistake with the on/off programming that Blair suggested was reasonable. He should go over every line of that interface. That would explain how she'd been created by accident, but not why the records claimed she'd always been there at the same time.

The only things that should be able to interfere with _his _world like this were the genes, and… Oh.

That was it: this was probably Maria's doing. Unlike Fayt, she hadn't subconsciously locked down her power, and unlike Sophia, she hadn't been trained in how to use it, she was just figuring it out as she went along.

The most likely scenario was that once Mirage existed, Maria had at some point decided to make an alteration to her. Perhaps something meant to protect her that would last into the future or she might have consciously decided to make it retroactive.

And for Mirage to always have been that way, Mirage would have had to exist always.

Fayt's power was simple, in the way a sword was simple. Deadly and terrifying, yes, but straightforward, and Fayt himself was doing a good job of keeping it under control and making sure it didn't inflict any collateral damage. It was easy to plan for what Fayt might do, even if the only real defense was to not get him angry at you.

Sophia's power was practically _made _of collateral damage, or effects, at least, but unlike destruction it was an inherently gentle power. Part of why Sophia would never want to hurt anyone was because if she was connected to something, hurting it was like hurting herself, and she wasn't a masochist. Connection was _certainly _the most far-reaching and potentially earth-shattering of the three, but the nature of the power itself kept it at 'mostly harmless.'

Maria's power was Alteration. It couldn't easily be classified: it was too amorphous, able to change even itself. The real wild card of the three.

Luther decided then and there that he was staying as far away from her as possible until the time came. She'd be around twenty then, hopefully she'd have enough control over her powers not to use them randomly and enough self-control and maturity to realize that it was wrong to change people without their consent.

Fayt and Sophia were like Blair: known quantities. They could be relied on to do certain things in certain ways, because they were certain sorts of people.

For instance, if Blair thought that he was about to commit geno, or technically xenocide?

Maria, however, embodied changeability, and if he was there when she was experimenting with her power there was too much risk he'd get experimented on too, as this demonstrated.

"I'll see you later," Blair said, after losing her patience with being ignored as her brother sat there, lost in thought.

* * *

One night, Maria had woken up to find that she suddenly had a big sister. If Maria hadn't been able to _feel _how everyone had been altered by those years of her presence, it would have scared her how everyone seemed to remember spending years with this person except her.

Mirage was a great big sister. Smart, strong, the daughter Master Kroas had always wanted. It eased the part of Maria that knew what she was and what had been done to her to see that even when he had a real daughter, Master Kroas still wanted her around. Mirage wasn't jealous of her, either.

Maria would have wondered if she'd made her, except her powers couldn't make things. She could only change what was already there, and she knew she hadn't kidnapped and brainwashed someone or anything like that.

Master Kroas was happy, Cliff really liked her… Maria really liked her…

The question was who had the power to make people? Because she had felt it when the world changed, felt the ripples of a power that was like hers. That was what had woken her up and made her go find Master Kroas just in case, only to find Mirage practicing.

Mirage fit in so well because someone had _made _her so that she would fit in so well. To do what needed doing, to play around with Cliff, to learn, to look after Maria: she felt like a missing piece that really _should _have been there all along.

Except Maria knew better.

Because she fit there so naturally, it was easy enough to alter things so that Mirage really had been there all along, so that Maria had memories of that. Had been watching Mirage all her life, not suspiciously, but curiously.

Someone had made Mirage. Someone like Maria, and the only reason she could think of to do that was because of her. Someone had made Mirage… for her. Used a terrifying power that could change everyone's memories and cause people to be certain ways to do something really nice. Mirage wasn't brainwashed (she'd checked), Mirage was just Mirage, not a tool. They'd made a person that would be happy here as well as make everyone else happier.

She'd thought of her power in terms of twisting people, in terms of a woman being willing to see even her own daughter as a thing to be used for whatever nefarious goal she'd had in mind. The idea that it didn't have to be like that? That this power could be used without it being abused?

It was a comforting thought, but she still hated remembering what her mother had done. Hated thinking about what she could do, and how everyone might react. She couldn't get rid of her powers, but she'd been thinking, for a long time, about locking them away. She couldn't alter herself so she didn't have them, but she could alter her memory of them, right? If she didn't know she had them, if she didn't remember the things her mother had forced her to do to learn how to control them, then maybe she wouldn't use them?

That worked.

For a few years, anyway.


	3. Tyr's Day

_Tuesday, Tyr's day, day of war._

_Maria as war goddess. Although Tyr's a god. And Maria is far more Morrigan than Norse._

_One would think that Fayt's gene would be a better fit for a war god, but what Fayt's gene does can't be called war. Maria fights wars, Fayt's power ends wars._

_Tyr's story has an interesting situation that is not like a dog biting the hand that feeds it. No, not at all._

_I'm going to be calling 'Azazer' Azazel throughout this fic. The US version changing the Creator's name to Luther I don't have a problem with. It's a nice name with fantastic symbolism for how I'm doing the character. Azazer, however, is a misspelling (l & r are the same letter in Japan). It sets my teeth on edge._

_My vision of Azazel was really given life by the scene before the boss battle with him and the camp gay one in the bonus content. For one thing, I think his contempt towards the party wasn't because they were AI. He's that way towards almost everyone (but especially the dishonorable). While backstabbing is part of the game among conventional job hunters, jobs with security clearance requirements tend to go to the honorable out of sheer practicality (no one likes being blackmailed). In his worldview, those without jobs lack talent and ambition and most people with jobs are backstabbing idiots who do things like plot borderline illegal actions when they should know damn well that there are security cameras present. Very much a Knight In Sour Armor who holds to his principles not because he believes in justice, but because he has standards and refuses to sink to certain people's levels._

_Due to an odd chain of events he saw Blair & Luther's sibling partnership in action, and he was very impressed that even though they'd come so far, they'd still back each other up instead of betrayal and so on ensuing as per SOP. So, his honor code caused him to stick his own neck out for them. He got promoted to head of department as thanks, which convinced him that he'd finally found some decent people worth protecting. Actually, due to the whole weirdness of that chain of events, Blair saw something that made her think that Azazel had a crush on Luther and his old-fashioned loyalty since then has just provided more evidence, since Blair thinks that loyalty to an employer is just as mythical as the tooth fairy. Thus, falling in love became the only logical explanation for Azazel risking his job. Cynicism and romanticism are an odd combo. I like considering how culture affects people._

_Luther has been tactfully ignoring the matter ever since because good help is hard to find and it's a really bad idea to scorn your head of security when you're plotting something. Actually, while it was a reasonable assumption for Blair to make under the circumstances, Azazel not only isn't interested in either of them but he'd be really insulted if he ever found out they thought he might be. It's bad for a bodyguard to be personally attached, so if he did fall for either of them he'd have to resign immediately, horror of horrors._

_In a different AU, I think this version might make a good mentor for Maria, like Luther is to Sophia and Blair would be for Fayt. They're both people who have seen too much to be cured of their misanthropy, and given Maria's penchant for underhanded tactics, she'd likely benefit from someone who put it in terms of, 'don't stoop to their level: you're better than that,' instead of, 'that's wrong.'_

* * *

Summer vacation meant many things. Lighter course loads and more free time, or heavier course loads and less free time, depending. For once in this life, he actually had no classes, neither taking nor teaching, since the professorship started next semester.

This meant he was hanging out on the park deck of the Symbology building, drinking a chai latte that he'd gotten from the nearby cart (just to try it, he normally just went for coffee) and grimacing at the play of light and shadow among the cherry trees and the sparkling from the fountain.

None of the other people there noticed anything, but the problem jumped out at him. He'd created sapient life and he _still _couldn't fix three graphics problems. Damn photons: wave, particle, they should make up their minds! In a rational universe, they'd pay some attention to cause and effect instead of knowing optimal paths ahead of time, too, but he was trying to reproduce his own universe, and…

Time travel.

He could solve those graphics problems with time travel.

Frankly, the most impressive achievement of his own universe's god (or goddess: it certainly hadn't been a committee effort, or an effort at all) might indeed have been separating the light from the darkness. Life was generally quite happy to create itself, if you gave it a chance, but visible light was a contrary bitch that went out of its way to be difficult. Unless they'd just used a template.

Still, _time travel. _The idea of using time travel for_ anything_ had once been a pipe dream, and here he was thinking about using it to solve some minor graphics issues that only he and really picky art critics who had killed some time studying physics had ever noticed.

Actually, the fact no one had noticed them was sort of the problem, from the reading he'd done on the subject. Questions about why light did some of the really weird stuff it did had puzzled scientists, once, and led to the discoveries of a lot of truths about his universe. Sadly, they weren't very nice truths, but still. The phrase that heralded a breakthrough wasn't 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny…'

Of course, it wasn't like Dr. Leingod needed any more encouragement, much less puzzles to solve.

Still, thinking about time travel as just one more tool in his arsenal, one more function he could call up to solve a problem?

_Man_, it was awesome to be a god.

What other word was there for someone with this kind of power?

The sun was shining, the background music was actually pretty good (he'd have to look up the band later), cherry blossoms weren't falling in his drink for once because the gardening staff was sort of on strike (it was still hard to get his mind around the idea of strikes), the doctors had mentioned his name at the report night before last so they were doing the background checks to bump him up around three clearance levels, one of the sororities was doing something in the fountains that made for an even nicer view, he'd solved problems that had been bugging him for years, and Sophia had still been right when she'd walked up to him, holding a cup of juice, and said, "Is something wrong?"

Well, technically she'd asked it, but they both knew that it was just a rhetorical question. "Where's your dad?"

"He's still in his office." For Sophia, summer break meant summer school or 'Take Your Daughter to Work Day' almost every day. She took the question as a cue to sit down. "Uncle Robert told Fayt and me to come up here and run around in the fountain until we could sit still again." Judging from the fact that Sophia was sitting down calmly and Fayt was splashing around in the fountain, she'd just come to keep him company.

Dr. Leingod knew that he was up here, since Ashton was sort of on call at the moment in case something went wrong in the labs. "So you came to let me know that you were here and he was expecting me to keep an eye on you?"

"I came because you're really worried about something." She put her juice down on the table and looked at him earnestly. "You really need to make more friends."

He fiddled with one of the bracelets on his wrists and made sure she noticed that he was doing it.

"Is that ok?" Sophia wondered.

"It's fine. I know this building's security, this will cover everything." They could speak freely without having to worry about anyone or any camera hearing the real conversation. He sighed, tilting back his head. "I accidently created someone."

"Again?" Why was something he'd done before bothering him now?

"Not the same thing. I meant to create all of you. Well, I didn't know that you'd evolve actual sentience, but the whole process was very deliberate. I even annotated it out properly." Nowadays he was rarely nice enough to do that. It was the job of his employees to work to understand the system he created; it wasn't his job to waste time making it easy on them. "I was thinking about designing a character, and then I start looking for someone that would work as background for them," parent, an equivalent to modify, whatever, "And just me thinking about it, just… planning it out in my head, had made her come to life. That's not the only thing that I've imagined that…" The light.

It was perfect.

He banged his head back on the back of his chair. "That was the first time, and this won't be the last. I disabled that function when I couldn't find a bug and that didn't stop it! I only plugged the neural net in long enough that I could taste my drink! The next thing I know, pink elephants will be appearing in midair!" And going splat on the pavement dozens of stories below. What if that happened to _people_?

"Pink elephants?"

"You haven't heard that one? Try not to think of a pink elephant."

Sophia frowned, concentrating. After a second, she frowned harder. Then it went to outright pouting.

"Don't feel bad, it takes years of training. If it's even possible." He took a sip of his drink: he should finish it before anything managed to go wrong enough that he'd have to retcon it away. "Sophia, did you do anything last Sunday? Because that was the first time this happened."

"No." She shook her head. "I might not be very good at severing connections, so I can't stop data coming in, but I can control when I make or strengthen connections now." He'd helped her. "I wouldn't have done anything that made you make things without asking."

"It was worth a shot. At least I managed to narrow down that it started then. I can't figure it out. Unless I accidently put a timed Easter Egg somewhere." He mentally queried anything that had been set to activate on that day, either Sphere time or Earth time. Even though he used the signal of holding the third bracelet down while he framed the commands, nothing happened. He tried it again, without holding the bracelet. "Well, I can't access the search function mentally now. Maybe the problem resolved itself?"

He decided to test it by thinking of a pink elephant.

A stuffed toy appeared next to Sophia's drink. She blinked at it. For her?

Of course: what did he want with a pink elephant plushie?

"No, looks like it's still happening. Let's see. I can make people, gardenias and pink elephants, and set up time travel-based graphics functions, but I can't access the search function."

"Gardenias?"

"Roses have been done to death, they're too cliché," he informed her.

"I like roses."

"Well, Cassandra in the Applied Biology department likes gardenias."

Sophia perked up. "Are you finally making friends?"

"Well…" It was really emphasis on the benefits. Wait a minute. "What do you mean? Of course I have friends."

"There's Blair, and me, and Fayt, and our parents, and that's everyone. We're family. You don't have any friends, and that's sad," she informed him.

He blinked at her. Wait, what? He had tons of… acquaintances. With benefits or without. "You're right, again. Do you have _any _idea how weird it is to work with people who genuinely want me to get ahead? Sure, there are a few who are jealous, or want to get ahead enough they want to make other people look bad, but all this cooperation and people going the extra mile when it won't make _them _look good makes me paranoid."

"There's Mr. Azazel," she pointed out.

"He's not a friend." He was just a security officer who was capable of resisting temptation or curiosity and keeping his mouth shut when it came to small children who needed to be disguised and gotten in and out of the complex unnoticed so they could visit Gemity without anyone realizing that they or the man who didn't look anything like Luther had anything to do with Sphere Company. That took Blair levels of thickheaded determination to be an ethical person. "He's an employee."

"He likes you. He wants to help." There would be lots of people who wanted to help him, if he would tell them what he had planned instead of being so determined to be the red team, to play the bad guy so no one would take that position that wasn't playing around. If the government and stuff thought he would handle the situation, then they wouldn't.

Luther coughed. "You know how family and friendship aren't quite the same thing?" No, they were not having this conversation. "Maybe if I try making a search function right now instead of just querying the main one… That worked. I think you were right earlier. It_ is_ making things. No, there weren't any timed events." Hmm.

"Something that happened on Sunday?" She looked at him. "Someone connected to you. Not on Sunday, but… Someone changed you, and it wasn't me." She frowned.

"Can you follow the connection back?" He quickly swallowed the last of his drink and tossed it in the trash can.

"I can go to where they are."

"Time to be invisible." That took another bracelet.

"It's someone who's connected to me, too. It's one of the kinds of connection Fayt has, the way we're connected to you and the Sphere. It's been there for a long time."

The chains of fate. The one she'd followed to find him in his office that day, when they'd first tested the ability they'd crafted to go to him and kill him.

"Maria Traydor." He'd thought about coming in contact with that power, and it had come in contact with him. The way it was meant to.

"Are you ok?" He felt a small (invisible) hand on his arm.

"I'm not dead." Sophia was here, and that was just as good as Blair being there. The fact that he knew that this was because she'd tampered with his mind and caused there to be this bond between them remained, but he didn't hate her for it. She hadn't done it deliberately; she'd just wanted to know what had happened. Where this strange place was, what her daddy and Uncle Robert were doing to her. She'd needed someone to be there for her that day, when she'd been thrown out of her own universe accidently, and it had been him. It wasn't using him when Connection bound her as well, meant that she was here for him when he needed it.

"Your heart is beating really fast. Your other heart," she corrected that. His real one.

"Can you… thanks," he said, as he felt her concern and wish for him to calm down. He was too young for a heart attack, but there were things he'd built the Sphere's people to be without or resistant to. They were stronger, tougher, could handle more atmospheric variation…

If he were the jealous type he'd be saying they were lucky bastards.

"Her power is alteration. I thought that if I stayed away she wouldn't be able to use it on me, but I forgot the Eternal Sphere, didn't I? It's the Sphere that would have made Mirage, and she might be able to affect me through it, or did she just change it to be more amenable to my wishes to… create…" Creation.

"I need," he said slowly, "a means of testing changes to my character's genes."

No changes.

"My real genes."

No changes. But then, would they be _changes? _

He reactivated his thought-based command ability to tell the system to cease taking orders from him for the next thirty seconds.

He was _still _able to refill his drink. No wonder blocking the system's ability to read his thoughts hadn't helped. He hadn't given the system orders to make the rest of these things, he'd made them himself.

When the period was up, he logged out. Maria's ability was symbological. Yes, it was magic, but it was still based on the laws of symbology, of _his _Eternal Sphere_. _There had to be a record of what she'd done and when _somewhere_, in some form. It had to conform to the laws of symbology even if not the laws of physics.

By the pitiless and hungry darkness between the stars, by the entropy that drew the universe ever onwards towards eternal deathly sameness, what had she done?

The date… was in the last few months before the end, even though she'd targeted the in-universe day he'd made Mirage. The effects were sweeping through the Eternal Sphere, and even if he couldn't see changes in his own universe so easily, he could see what had to be changes caused by ripples that had swept through it and were coming back to affect the Sphere.

The time to the date of separation or destruction was shortening.

Whatever she'd done hadn't taken place in the last few months before the end, but in the last few _days_. He _couldn't _risk logging in to that time period.

Except he had about thirty-four hours, in terms of time lived, before the moment when she'd do whatever she was going to do would be obliterated by the retroactive changes, and then there would be no chance of undoing it. Sophia could connect, Fayt could destroy, but neither could alter. Neither could undo whatever she'd done. He needed to not just stop her but convince her, and a Maria of the final months would see him as the enemy. There was no way he could alter or control her mind or feelings: alteration was _her _forte.

It wasn't his 'Ashton Fords' avatar that was present where she was in that time, or even the avatar he used for public appearances as himself for in-game events or doing work with other staff: it was his actual physical body. She'd dragged it into the Eternal Sphere?

He stared at the prompt. How could he log in to his own body? It didn't work that way. He would be in it automatically, wouldn't he? The people of the Eternal Sphere might have minds that were separate from their bodies and could go on without them, but humans (his world's humans) _were _their bodies, their neurons, every spark and neurotransmitter.

He logged in to that specific moment anyway.

* * *

"Show us what you really are!"

"What have you done?" Was all he could say when she'd finished. There should have been memories in this head, his own head that would tell him what was going on, but there weren't. The only way that could be, the only reason they wouldn't retroactively form was if he wouldn't live long enough to form them. He'd had to study temporal mechanics because of all this, and even with the Sphere's help they _still _made his head hurt.

"What did you do to Ashton?" Fayt demanded: Luther didn't know whether he was asking him or Maria.

"You're one of us now. I made you what you would be if you were human." the leader of Quark told the Creator, trying to hide how much doing something of this magnitude had exhausted her. "If we die, you die." She'd seen the administrator account, before she'd altered it to strip him of his power.

What he would have been here? What he was here was… "You little idiot." But then again, wouldn't it be his fault that she wouldn't know any better? "You've ruined everything."

"Luther?" Sophia was there: she caught him as he fell.

"Sophia, go to my world, find Blair and… No, there's not enough time, this time won't exist long enough." She'd changed his body. _Retroactively_. "Maria changed me in the past as well; it must have taken effect the instant the Sphere was created this time. An AI killing and replacing, or worse, like the Borg, the human who created them, and using his position to hide them, all this time?" Retroactive. From the moment the Sphere had been turned on. Before he'd met Sophia. He would have _panicked, _or perhaps he wouldn't have noticed it when it happened, and gone in for a physical on schedule in all innocence. "There's no way I'd have lasted this long, I'm already dead, that's why I don't remember any of it, and they'd have killed all of you as well…" So many deadlines approaching as the temporal ripples spread: that might be a few months, but, "Thirty-four hours, thirty-four hours until Blair finds me unconscious," a do not disturb sign would only be obeyed for so long, once Blair got worried, and logging into his own body had made it his real one, abandoning the one left behind, "a hospital, and they'd find that my genes had been changed… Thirty-four hours until they pull the plug on the prototype Eternal Sphere." He coughed. This was a Federation starship, from the insignia: had 'Ashton' slipped, or had Maria checked everyone to make sure they weren't PCs? He coughed again. The blend of air Federation starships used was different from that of his Earth: it had to be killing his lungs. If his physical body really was here, with all its human frailties?

Sophia gasped, and grabbed his hand. Blood?

"You altered this to match, to be my true form, didn't you?" His true form if he'd been born in the Eternal Sphere, perhaps. In other words, _without _the gene therapy that had cured this little problem. Couple that with this sort of atmosphere?

The Eternal Sphere had gene therapy, but not on starships. It barely had radiation; it certainly didn't have a certain recessive mutation.

He couldn't breathe.

"Don't try to talk!" Sophia told him, setting him down carefully.

The healing spell bought a little time. "Don't bother, Sophia, I'll just keep getting worse again until she undoes this or this body dies." This was the Eternal Sphere, death was cheap. He could stick around as a ghost and try to convince them.

"Sophia, what's going on?" Fayt asked.

"He's been trying to help us, all this time. Maria, you have to help him!" Luther could see the symbols appear around Sophia. They rarely did anymore. She must be doing something _very _drastic.

Maria staggered, hit with a rush of knowledge and feelings. Unlike Luther, she didn't have the experience to tell the difference between her own feelings and Sophia's fear for him. Almost frantic, as though she was trying to save Cliff or Mirage, she moved next to him and raised her own power.

With Connection so strong here, its power flowing along the bonds between him and Sophia, Sophia and Maria, it was inevitable that it flowed into the other bonds.

Fayt Leingod. The fate of the line of god. All of these children had been shaped so that they would be his destiny, made to kill him. In fact, that was the only reason Sophia had been born, but the Eternal Sphere kept track of these things. It knew the past, present and future, it saw the symbols, the programs written in their genes and knew their purpose.

Dr. Leingod had done all this to ensure that they met him, hacked his own universe in a way that its creator himself still didn't fully understand, and that was why Sophia had appeared in his office. That was why Maria could do things like this to him, that was why he'd had to spend all this time becoming Fayt's friend.

Because otherwise, the young man would have killed him.

Or was obliterated a better word?

They were his fate. They had been made to be as powerful as him, with powers that matched his, countered them, could undermine them or bypass them and render him helpless to stop them.

"You… are Ashton?" Fayt could feel it now, through the power that had seized them all. The power of destruction tried to break free, to destroy the threat, the power so like that which it had been programmed to destroy, but he held it back. This was _Sophia's _power. He wasn't going to kill Sophia.

This was also his friend, who had encouraged him to learn what he was interested in, given him summer jobs helping with research, told him which classes were interesting and professors to avoid and so much else. Just as much an honorary uncle as Dr. Esteed.

"Yes." He owed him that.

"Then why all this?" Fayt asked, even though he could see, no, feel the time of destruction rushing towards them. No, of, of _stopping_, freezing that might have been eternal if it wouldn't be followed by utter annihilation.

"Very soon, this won't have happened. This _can't _happen." He could feel Maria altering the timeline so that it wouldn't just repeat once this reset it. The pain in his chest had already gone away, and that meant no discovery (not for years). "They have to think that I'm on the side of my own world instead of yours. The people where I'm from… We're so fragile, compared to you." There was too much to say in such a short time. "Will I remember this?"

"I'll make sure you do," Maria promised, focusing.

"What… gave me away?"

"You tried to alter that Executioner at the same time I was trying to weaken it. I thought you were trying to prevent me from destroying it." Now, she could feel that he would have been trying to stop it as well, reprogram it a little so they would survive finding out what they were up against.

"I should have realized I wouldn't be able to hide powering something down from you." What a stupid mistake!

"Just log out," Sophia told him, now that she could feel that he was alright. "You'll end up in the time in your world that you accessed us from."

"Wait, what will happen to us?" Fayt asked. He could feel that the specific end of everything he'd felt had gone away, but now there was something… murkier.

"Don't worry, Fayt. We'll go back to the way things were," Sophia assured him."He's always intended to tell you the truth when it was safe." She wiped his face clean, even though that would very shortly be pointless, and he felt her admin account log him out as time began to reshape itself once again.

* * *

It was Blair that found him lying exhausted in his 4d Workspace, but he was able to push away her concern after letting her watch him eat something and promising to watch his blood sugar.

_Note to self_, he wrote in his personal script, carefully avoiding the older symbols. _Keep in mind that while I may possess godly powers, I am not the only one and the others are children and will be teenagers. _

In other words, _idiots_.

He was fairly close to invincible in any sort of straight-up battle. After all, all it would take was materializing a few battleships or Executioners and he could conquer his own world. It would be a snap. However, this wasn't a battle. This was an attempt to avoid a battle that would sow fear. That would pit him against the people who _could _fight him, and it was fear of him that had made the Eternal Sphere create them in the first place. If he conquered them, if they knew what he was, they'd make more. They had the symbology.

Maria was just intelligent enough and she'd found out just enough that time to get herself in serious trouble.

He really _should _train her, like Sophia, but then what he _really _should do was not just kill her but destroy her, utterly. Cut her off from the afterlife and any chance at rebirth. Remove her from the playing field.

Except he couldn't do that. It wasn't a matter of ethics, what did ethics matter with trillions of lives at stake, but he couldn't.

That, he could blame Sophia for. Maria was part of her 'family,' the third of the trinity their parents had made. That was the bargain, after all, even if Sophia didn't think of it that way.

They wouldn't be able to bring themselves to kill him, and he wouldn't be able to kill them.

Ties that bound always went both ways. It was only fair, after all, and Sophia was one of those people who believed in fairness.

Just to be on the safe side, he still tested his genes.

The genes Dr. Leingod had designed for each of the three had been made incapable of interfering with or destroying each other, as a side effect of being protected against his power. (Although they could kill each other, as they'd been made to kill him.)

Maria might have made him human again, but by changing him into who he would be in her universe she had made another change, one she couldn't undo.

Who he was in her universe was the Creator.

He was human again. But he still carried the power of symbology in his genes.

The counterpart of destruction, as Fayt was intended to be his nemesis.

Creation.

At least he could keep it from showing up in the genes of his characters. _That _wouldn't look good on a Federation background check. Expellians might have natural symbols in their genes, but not ones like _that. _

This… was not good. Time to start avoiding hospitals. He might even have to resort to healing spells if it came down to it, even though he'd decided long ago that under no circumstances would he use anything from the Sphere to affect the real world. He wouldn't be the one to give it away.

Right now, though, he already was a walking giveaway that something was up.


	4. Woden's Day

_Wednesday, Woden's (Odin's) Day. This is more a reference to the Hanged Man aspect of the guy, power and knowledge derived from suffering, than the TriAce version. Dr. Leingod gets this one, of course._

_I'm going to take this opportunity to recommend _Eight Days of Luke_ by Diana Wynne Jones. Other than that, there isn't really much to say here. While Dr. Leingod is certainly very capable of making with the speculation and world-changing technobabble, this is the midpoint of a Xanatos Gambit. I'm not having to write him coming up with stuff on the fly, unlike Luthor. The game _really _should have done more with Dr. Leingod. One more instance of _They Wasted A Perfectly Good Plot...

_Disclaimer: I don't own Star Ocean, 3 or otherwise, Tri-Ace and the other rightful owners do. No infringement intended or money made. _

_Oh, regarding Welch: she's actually a beta tester/employee, fairly low ranking but Luther does get her reports. Welch may show up in 4d at some point, helping Blair, but that remains to be seen. There's a game, I think it's called _Creatures_, that was kind of an early _Spore_. Some players noticed that even though the creatures shouldn't really have been able to differentiate between types of food in the coding, occassionally they'd get one that would really like apples or something, or show some other little sign of personality, maybe luck and maybe how the AI experienced the game. Ashton's fondness for barrels fits very well with that, really. The AI inhabitants of the Eternal Sphere manifesting personality, having likes and dislikes because of how their lives played out that aren't just programming. The quirk stuck in Luther's mind when he read Welch's report, so he didn't actually pick the name of a generic hero, he picked one that symbolized that the people of the Sphere were individuals. The last name Fords was just chosen for what it means, a nice little metaphor. The word is even English. Think about the similarities and differences between fords and bridges._

_...and I thought I didn't really have anything to say in the A/Ns here. Well, not anything relevant to the chapter, which I suppose is still true._

* * *

"Don't think of it as your daughter getting hit with sticks, think of it as government-sponsored daycare."

"Just because you put Fayt in kendo classes almost as soon as he could walk… You're right," he admitted. "It's probably a good idea. Martial arts teach self-discipline, and she should have a means of self-defense other than…" Damn, he'd almost slipped and mentioned her powers aloud. "I don't want to keep a gun in the house."

"A staff is a good choice of weapon for her." Staffs were the weapon of choice for a lot of symbology users, since they doubled as weapon and shield, and so a lot of them were made with built-in patterns and symbols to enhance the power of symbology. Connection theoretically meant that she'd have access to every single spell and type of power, although obviously the more they studied her, the greater the risk, not just that the government would notice the experiments but that she would figure out what was going on, realize that she had this power and start experimenting herself. Sophia was an energetic, sociable girl who was always doing something with someone whenever she wasn't stuck alone in an empty house.

Honestly, letting her stay a latchkey kid would probably have been smarter than letting her get out and do things, since the fewer people she grew close to the fewer that might find out, but Robert couldn't blame her father for feeling guilty that she got so lonely and bored. Tossing all the craft supplies in the world at her (painting, sewing, clay) didn't make up for not having parents or anyone else at home, creative streak or not. Robert couldn't send Fayt over there all the time, even though when Fayt went over to Sophia's house all the time (and vice versa) he didn't ask if he could go over to his classmates' houses. The other thing Robert had done to prevent his son from having much of a social life was install a VR room for his birthday, the kind where you stood there and everything was projected around you, on the grounds that the games would help him practice his kendo.

Ryoko had been willing to go on hiatus and as good as sacrifice her career to look after Fayt, and with him the fate of the universe, but Dr. Esteed's wife was too important where she was, just like Robert himself, even though it meant her husband and Sophia barely ever saw her.

"And the alternative is hiring another babysitter for Wednesday nights."

"See? This kills too birds with one stone. He's teaching the beginners' class, Sophia would just be starting out: he wouldn't let her get hurt."

Dr. Esteed rolled his eyes. "Of course not, that would hinder his ability to pick up chicks," he replied, only mostly joking. Half the department knew that was why Ashton, who normally assisted or taught in the upper-level staff fighting courses – he'd even been in a few competitions and gotten a minor scholarship for it as an undergrad – had let himself be volunteered for the Wednesday night intro course at the student rec center, even if the normal instructor was off on paternity leave. This course was the one that involved people who were there for the exercise as well as gamers and people who legitimately wanted to learn to fight with a staff, either for self-defense or because they were headed for fieldwork offworld, the way Ashton was.

As soon as he finished his degree and got someone to fund The Grant Proposal, anyway. Obviously you'd best be a competition-level fighter if you intended to try to capture a demigod.

Regardless, a lot of people headed for hazardous field research or who just needed to focus on their studies and careers had 'no permanent relationships' (maybe three dates, max) as their ground rule, both for their own protection (so they didn't fall in love) and because they didn't want their partners to get too attached and wreck their dreams, either. Ashton was smart, funny, had the advantage of being a little exotic and was an athlete, but that was actually something of a hindrance in picking up fellow grad students: his female colleagues were a little too worried that they might get attached. Robert had to admit that using him to watch Fayt and Sophia on campus occasionally did Ashton more harm than good: the young man would make a good father someday.

He generally dated seniors who had been on campus long enough they knew how it worked and wouldn't allow themselves to get attached because they were headed for careers or grad positions at other universities, but the school year was just starting and being a TA meant he had to avoid people who might want to take one of his classes, too.

Still, having Sophia attend his class at the rec center would help his chances there, so Robert had known he wouldn't object. "If you hire another babysitter, you'd have to get them a security clearance in advance." When your projects included working on the Federation's most advanced weapons systems, they made sure you were careful.

"I can ask the grad students who already have them." They both knew Dr. Esteed was just playing devil's advocate. Grad students were smart. They picked up oddities. They would view this as an opportunity to get close to him and advance their academic careers: that was how it worked. He couldn't just hire and dump. Any grad student he used to pinch hit would not end up being a temporary addition to Sophia's social circle, and he hadn't gone over the options in advance.

It wasn't as though Ashton had dumped this on Dr. Esteed. They'd both heard from different gossip sources that the intro staff fighting course was suddenly getting an influx of mainly female interest and why, he just hadn't thought about the time and made the connection. If this was an ordinary babysitting job, which Ashton obviously thought it was, they wouldn't have been paranoid enough to need more than a month's warning in advance.

It was Dr. Esteed's own fault he hadn't figured out what it all meant. "We both know this is the best thing for her. You should have thought about this years ago." When Robert had nudged him to do something to get her trained in _something _that she could apply to her powers when the time came.

"You're insufferable, you know that?" It should be illegal to be right all the time the way Robert was. He still didn't say it with any real venom.

"Being this brilliant is a curse." Robert's smile was more wry twist of the lips than smile. The Voice might have said that it wasn't his fault they were all going to die, that the research would have been performed eventually, but everyone knew that Robert had single-handedly advanced symbological research by decades. Perhaps even centuries.

The world might not be ending because of him per se, but he'd cut decades off its lifespan. Single-handedly hastened its death.

"I just don't want her getting hurt."

"You can't keep her at home forever."

"I know, but… This is your fault, you know. You're the one who told Fayt that she would be taking staff classes." And then Fayt had been all excited that he and Sophia could finally start playfighting together and it would be practice (instead of causing him to get yelled at for 'bullying' by Dr. Esteed even though Sophia stuck up for him), and gotten Sophia excited, and when he'd come home and opened the door she'd run up and hugged him for letting her go to Ashton's class.

"I said she might be."

Dr. Esteed gave his friend, colleague and conspirator of long standing a look.

"I know, I know. But it works out. Fayt's classes are also on Wednesdays after school, Ryoko can get Sophia there and back too."

"Did you just set this up now because there's no way I can say no to Sophia when she's so excited, or because you wanted her attending _this _class?"

Dr. Leingod hesitated.

"Do you think we would be having this conversation if I hadn't swept my office for bugs?" Honestly. "I'm not stupid, Robert."

"He knows what it's like to perform symbology, not just study it. He's not afraid to think outside the box." Capturing gods? "He should be able to handle the truth. He can fight, and none of the rest of us can, although Fayt's progressing and now Sophia will finally get started. He can keep his mouth shut and he's loyal. There are smarter people," true. This was the most prestigious university in the PanGalactic Federation. You couldn't throw a rock without hitting a supergenius, and very few people were smarter than Robert Leingod. "But he's hard working, doesn't know when to give up and we both saw his file."

Ashton Fords' family had been traveling folk, the kind that lived in a starship and traveled from planet to planet. Obviously, that made it a bit difficult to do well in school and create a good enough academic record, so he'd been sent to boarding school, which was fortunate for him, because it meant that he hadn't been onboard when a half-asleep traffic controller had ended up getting his family's ship pulverized by a cargo supership, and fortunate for them because he'd been raised in a large, extended family situation and clearly missed that.

Ryoko had adored the young man since the day Robert came home chuckling and told her about the dressing down Ashton had given a couple other students for not cleaning up after themselves in the lab, and he had indeed managed to get Fayt to shut up and just do his chores when no amount of cajoling or threats had.

He'd gotten attached to Fayt, Sophia: all of them. Of course, that was a danger as well as an asset.

"Do you do want to let him in on it too? Eventually," Dr. Esteed added when he saw Robert's look of disapproval.

"No," he said firmly. "I don't. Ideally, we'll wait until Fayt and Sophia are adults," which, in Robert's world, meant 'have gotten a doctorate in something that isn't a humanity,' although Sophia was probably going to end up doing something artistic. "With the maturity to handle all of this. Then we go on sabbatical, somewhere out of the way, and drop by Styx on the way back." After they'd been trained.

"We both know it's not going to be that simple."

"We can hope. We've kept this under the Federation's radar, haven't we?"

"The voice was aware that this power could be dangerous."

"And hopefully it hasn't been paying attention to the details of what we have done." It wouldn't have given them all these years to prepare for the confrontation otherwise, right? "It already knew we were dangerous, and it had made up its mind about what it was going to do when we talked to it. It said that who we were didn't matter," essentially. "So hopefully it doesn't care about us or what we might come up with. If it weren't stupidly arrogant, it wouldn't have given us that warning."

"It was meant as a kindness." To give them time to say goodbye, time to live. To tell them not to blame themselves.

"Yes. Kindness. Like patting the head of a dog you're going to put to sleep because it bit someone who provoked it. Oh wait: we hadn't done that yet."

"But we are going to." It had known them that well.

"Were we given a choice?" When the other option was to roll over and die, and the two children that had already been born with them? No.

Of course, Dr. Esteed's daughter hadn't been born yet. He'd brought her into this world knowing its fate. Knowing that he was going to have to use her as a weapon. No wonder he acted like he wanted to keep her in a world of sunshine and kittens sometimes. No: sunlight had UV and kittens had claws.

Honestly…

"I know I'm not doing any good by trying to coddle her," Dr. Esteed said, recognizing that expression and warning Robert to drop it with his own. "But it would be a good idea to have someone who can be backup, if we need it. Isn't that why Sophia was born in the first place?"

They'd given Fayt the most important gene, Destruction, and Maria the versatile Alteration in case the rest of them were caught and she had to do it alone. Sophia had been given Connection so that she could get Fayt to the Creator or find Maria, if it came down to that.

"I'm not saying that it isn't good to have a backup plan. But we can't consider telling him part of _the _plan." They couldn't make plans that assumed they'd have him as backup. "Every person that knows or has any chance of finding it out is a potential leak. One leak, and _everyone dies_. I like Ashton too, but we have to remember that he is a _liability_." He leaned forward, looked hard at Dr. Esteed before admitting, "But there may be worse liabilities, and it's worth the effort to try to minimize his. Still: what happens if he finds out right now? That we experimented on Fayt and Sophia?"

"He'd report us to child services and the Federation military." Who would see to it that the untrustworthy, potentially traitorous researchers… were certainly in no position to train their living weapons and bring them to the Time Gate.

"Exactly. We wouldn't be able to stop him without killing him, _because _he cares about the two of them." He was Expellian, too. He'd understand the magnitude of what they'd done to their children, the way this could ruin their lives by causing others to fear them, in ways Dr. Esteed didn't and even Dr. Leingod might not. "We can't even think about it now. We have to wait until he's more worried about what the Federation would do to them than what we already have and might do more of. Until he trusts us enough to hear us out even after finding out about acts of child abuse that make…"

"Enough!" He couldn't stand thinking about it. "You're right, you're right, I give in. Sophia will attend the classes." He sighed. "I don't know why I bother arguing with you."

"It's not a crime to want to protect your only child."

"Oh?"

"Well, it shouldn't be." Even though he'd had to do terrible things to protect Fayt, to him and two other children. He could never forgive himself for what he'd done, but he could never regret it, either. Not if Fayt lived because of it.

He envied Ryoko for being able to go on hiatus from her professorship to be with Fayt as he grew up. He couldn't do that, not given the political situation. The Federation needed his expertise, and when someone was needed they had leeway. Power to use for negotiations. Access to research funding, labs and equipment to try to find out everything he could, anything he could that would help make this work.

Because this was his son, and the daughters of his friends. All of this was his idea.

And his fault.


	5. Thor's Day

_On measuring systems:_

_I think that the metric system has kind of been ruined for me because of how much practice I got with it, sadly. I'm always going to associate it with chemistry and physics, with exact and clinical weights, measures and amounts. 'A few liters' just feels wrong to me, and it just doesn't sit right to have a character that's dealing with… non-scientific issues 'suddenly' start using scientific measurements instead of 'normal' ones, even if in a future earth she probably would have grown up using the metric system and that's what would be normal._

_My apologies for the small worldbuilding… laziness/deliberate oversight that is the use of the old Imperial/current American system._

_Although that's nothing compared to what TriAce got up to, so it's rather perfectionist of me to even mention it…_

_Oh, Thursday (Thor's Day)… I'm dedicating this chapter to Narukami-kun, ahem, Narugami-kun of Matantei Loki Ragnarok, because seriously._

_This is Blaire's chapter (And Azazel's, to a degree). You'll notice that she's not present in a lot of it. This is because her area is studying the Eternal Sphere, and the part she's not there for contains stuff relevant to her interests. Narugami-kun is also the god of part-time jobs (a running joke) and losing them. I do a bit with Azazel in here, and there's also some sisterly smiting._

_The fact that the fic is an alternate character interpretation doesn't mean I get to ignore the way Luther acted in the game, it means I need to show that my version would act that way for the reasons I give. It would be OOC for Luther not to be, well…_

_In any case, when Blaire finds out about all this she is going to be so, so incredibly furious with him. While yes, she is practical enough (and a skilled enough Jobhunter, in this universe) to get why he kept everything a secret, and yes, saving the lives of her nieces and nephews is important, she had nieces and nephews and he didn't tell her. She will have missed Sophia & Fayt growing up. She will have missed those Sunday brunches, opportunities to get Fayt to follow in her footsteps, silly childhood games and the teapot song. I don't know why I like the idea of Blaire liking that song as a little kid. She just seems like the kind of person who had a lot of energy to burn off as a kid, and also generally upbeat and not caring about the opinions of others too much. She cares about Luther, but she'll still go against him in a heartbeat, especially when it's to keep him from becoming a murderer._

_In the game, Fayt's the scholar, really. Sophia cares about people, Maria cares about causes and Fayt wants to know the whys and so on. He's definitely going into research, theory mixed with field work, if he has his way. Fayt's also generally even-tempered, just don't be his problem and refuse to listen to reason or he'll have to do something about you. If I ever write a verse where Blaire was in on this from the beginning, she'd have dibs on Fayt/be saying that he takes after her despite the complete absence of a genetic relationship._

* * *

There was a very old children's book, that he had read when he was a child because it was old and had historical and philosophical significance for various reasons and would help in understanding history, called _The Water Babies_.

Most of it didn't stand out very much.

Not compared to one single line, anyway, that had stuck in his mind for years, even though he'd been raised to believe that (aside from facts and passing exams) gods and the possibility of them had about as much relevance to the lives of sensible people as giant purple teapots orbiting Pluto. Did they exist? Probably not. Did they have any impact on his life? No. Did he care whether they existed or not? While it might have been an interesting curiosity if one did, he hadn't.

Of course, there was no way for any reasonable person to anticipate that they'd eventually turn into such a teapot, so he could forgive himself for his lack of foresight.

…If Sophia didn't know the little teapot song, he was _not _teaching it to her. He had his dignity. She was too old for that now, anyway.

…He could probably have gotten Blair to do it, though.

Anyway, the important line, the one that had ended up his personal unofficial design motto, was that gods didn't make things. Gods made things make themselves.

Normally, when he added a galaxy (or a spiral arm, in the old days), he fed all the information in that astronomers had and let the system he'd created it extrapolate from there, backwards and forwards, to stars blooming and dying, scattering heavy elements like confetti , sparks from a firework (and they were his fireworks). Planets forming and shattering, seas freezing and atmospheres boiling away.

It was a matter of getting the physics/symbology right and a whole lot of computing power: fairly simple once he'd perfected it. He was always the one to do it himself, and watch from his Workspace, just in case, though.

It was providing what existence needed in order to exist, guidance and materials and memory space to be in, and then letting it unfold.

Then, it was a matter of adding what was missing from his own universe. He could have tweaked the initial calculations to favor habitable worlds, but he _did _insist that those be made by someone, especially once he'd known that sentient life really could, and would, evolve on its own. At least so far it had only done so among the races he'd meant to be sentient, and he meant to keep it that way. He couldn't stand the thought of some race gaining sentience but not the ability to speak or understand others, getting used as beasts of burden without anyone knowing or evolving short, wretched lifespans and not getting entered into the reincarnation lottery… Making sure there weren't any sad cases like that meant going over every life-bearing world himself, at least with a few search functions no one else knew existed because they didn't know what Luther was looking for existed, but it had to be done.

He wanted all the races to be able to understand each other, too. No incomprehensible intelligences but people that could live in peace, if they worked at it.

The deck would never be stacked against any of them, if he had anything to say about it, and this was his universe.

And the ratio of intelligent life to habitable worlds had to be high enough to be interesting, but low enough that there would always be more planets. People would always have somewhere to go, and without having to push out or oppress people already living there. More frontiers, hopes and dreams to reach for if their world grew stale or repressive.

Adding an expansion pack galaxy was always a massive undertaking that involved lots and lots of manhours, but that was why his staff loved them. They'd actually been working on this one for awhile, and he'd mostly left them to it, with appropriate oversight.

But the thing was, a lot of it was remodeling planets. And life would generally take care of itself, so it was just a matter of nudging it into something vaguely compatible. An amazing amount of the work here, or the stuff he left to his flunkies anyway, was like pruning, or the way you tied vines to get them to grow certain ways and cover your fence. Training?

Encouraging, sheparding?

Almost all his employees (all those with souls, at least) had a few planets that they loved. This was an artistic endeavor, no cookie-cutter work here, not from those chosen for the position, lucky enough to be hired. It was a good thing _Strata _was on the required reading list, though, because before he'd made it orientation material people had kept doing the same fourth-wall breaking things and thinking that they were being clever and original, coming up with something that actually, everyone else had too.

While boots in coal seams and so on were just juvenile, the debugging tools aside, one thing he did encourage was homages. Part of what he'd wanted to do was recreate that old sense of wonder. Middle Earth, Barsoom, Pern… They had to get his approval first, though, and be fairly senior staff. He didn't want twenty amateur knock-offs of Oz (that certainly wouldn't have had its surrounding nations).

Although he had bowed to popular demand and let someone copy the terrain in _Wicked_.

They all had to obey his ground rules & use his magic system, though. His universe, his rules. And laws of physics and symbology.

Today, though, he was taking a break from proper godly behavior, being hands off, all of that. He'd modeled one single solar system in his workspace, completely self-contained, so he didn't have to worry about prying eyes.

He'd designed countless programs and worlds, but today?

He was going to try out a shiny new toy.

He'd been manipulating the symbology programming language of the Eternal Sphere since its beginning. _No one _knew it a fraction as well as he did, not even Dr. Leingod (the fact he was scarily good at doing scary things with certain aspects of it aside). Creation was what he _did, _it came so naturally to him that he'd been doing it automatically before he realized he needed to make a distinction between thinking and doing in the same way there was a distinction between thinking about moving one's arm and actually moving it.

He really should be angry as hell with Maria over this, but from what she'd known it had actually been a pretty bright idea (and more merciful than he'd expect from her), and _this was going to be awesome_.

He was going to have to conceal that he had this ability…

Who was he kidding.

If he cared about the practical ramifications of his creations, he would have destroyed the Eternal Sphere as soon as he figured out the danger of AI overrunning his planet (or just blowing it up) instead of thinking that a girl appearing out of a computer in real life was the coolest thing ever.

Now it was the second coolest thing.

He could do _magic _now.

Not just programming inside the Eternal Sphere, but _magic_. That could affect things that hadn't been designed by someone considerate enough to give his creations the power to affect them.

Make rabbits appear in hats… Oh, sure, he wouldn't be able to turn people into newts, that was Maria, or read minds like Sophia, or blow stuff up without making some TNT or something to do it for him, but that was ok.

Anyone could destroy stuff, it was easy. And you didn't need to change things if you'd made them right in the first place. He could materialize fireballs, weapons out of nowhere: He couldn't _wait _to start playing around with this, even if for safety's sake he was going to have to practice in the Eternal Sphere.

"Drop this avatar's command level down to user for the next hour. Deactivate PC and NPC symbology recognition system in the testing area." That prevented him from programming or using symbology that didn't hack the system. The way Dr. Leingod's did. So well that it could even hack _his _universe's system.

On the one hand, he couldn't wait to get started. On the other, he couldn't seem to actually get started because this moment? He wanted to savor it for ever and ever.

This was just the best day of his life.

It even topped the day he'd gotten his first job here and the day he'd officially opened the Eternal Sphere.

He was going to have to do something _really _nice for Maria.

He'd already decided what he was going to make first.

A symbol of everything he'd worked for, everything he'd intended. The thing that he had been creating all along.

As he envisioned it, he realized that he hadn't just felt like his body was vibrating with excitement, bursting with energy, because of how long he'd dreamed of this. The thing he was about to make, the word he was about to speak, had been on the tip of his tongue the entire time.

It felt like wings unfurling when the symbols in his mind, his veins, his very genes formed and flowed around him, summoning their power from this universe, summoning _his _power. _His. _

This wasn't something that the Eternal Sphere was just doing at his command, this wasn't something that had happened because he had spent hours writing code: this was something that he was doing, here and now, and the result would appear before his very eyes.

Like magic.

He could feel the wish, the spell, grow ready, feel the perfect moment to call it forth approaching. To let the wings that had formed around him take flight. "_Be_," he said, and let go.

White clouds, blue seas, land of all colors: what a… beautiful…

…world.

"Perfect," he murmured, more to it than himself, as he closed his eyes.

And fell.

* * *

At 10:30 hours, Blair Lansfeld mysteriously managed to enter Luther Lansfeld's private Workspace despite the fact that he'd left orders that he should not be disturbed.

(Azazel was prepared to apologize profusely for this oversight, blame it on Blair's superior skills and technical ability, and hope that Luther never figured out that he'd looked the other way because Blair was going in there to make sure that Luther was keeping his promise to remember to eat. He hadn't left or had any food brought in for ten hours, and according to Blair's tally, his late-night emergency food supplies were running low.)

At 10:32 hours, Blair Lansfeld exited, looking long-suffering.

At 10:33 hours, Blair reached her own suite on the executive level, smiled nicely at the research assistant manning the waiting room so the poor woman didn't think Blair's rare ire was directed at her, went into the break room and picked up one of the spare drums of water they used for the water cooler.

At 10:34 hours, Blair entered Luther's domain again, still carrying the container of cold water.

(Obviously, security didn't monitor the inside of Luther's private domain, but it was fairly easy to guess what happened next.)

* * *

Dumping a few gallons of cold water onto Luther to wake him up was much more satisfying than it should have been, Blair thought as he sputtered awake, mouth set in a grim line. He hadn't woken up when she said his name or disconnected him from the Eternal Sphere: she'd been getting worried, dammit. If this hadn't worked, she would have had to page the medical staff.

He blinked up at her, clearly trying to wake up and figure out why she was suddenly there and he was wet.

The question wasn't, 'How could he do this to himself?' She knew Luther. When he was working on a project, he focused so intensely that he genuinely wouldn't feel thirst, hunger, or tiredness. Not until they hit him like a ton of bricks, anyway. He'd get caught up in his zone, and the next thing he knew it would be fourteen hours later, and he'd only know that because she would have asked him what time it was and corrected him when he guessed that it was only two or so hours later.

"My notes!"

Yes, Luther was fine. Or he would be as soon as she forced him to eat something. "You were passed out. _Again_. I know you've been busy because of the upcoming expansion," he'd ordered Azazel to make sure that no one disturbed him today because he'd gotten behind fixing a few graphics issues, "but who's going to run everything if you're in the hospital?"

"Why couldn't you have just shook me or splashed me or something? I need my notes!" The water was slowly spreading over more and more of the floor, soaking up the infernal pieces of paper he spread out everywhere. It wasn't that she didn't understand the creative process, but she wished he'd keep in mind that other people worked late too and might not have the awareness to keep an eye out for the things.

It was hard to feel guilty about his poor, drowned papers when she kept tripping on them. "You need to eat," she told him.

"I need to try and salvage my notes and get back to work."

"Luther…" She winced, feeling a headache coming on. "Are you _trying _to give your rivals ammunition to work with?"

"I have job security." Those words would have been said in more of a gloating tone if he weren't so distracted. They deserved it. "They can't run the Eternal Sphere without me."

"Yes, that's true. But there's a difference between running the Eternal Sphere and running the company." Carefully avoiding the papers, she headed over to the cupboard she'd put in here when he moved in. "Poor Luther, the stress of running a company is finally getting to him. You know those high-strung creative types. He can't even take care of himself, much less a company. Why, what would happen if he had a nervous breakdown? Can you imagine how the voters would react if the Eternal Sphere went offline? We need to make sure he doesn't lose it and deprive the world of the Sphere. Let's have him transferred to a position he's better suited for, oh, art director or head programmer. And order him to give root access to the new boss, so _someone _else has it just in case something terrible happens. We could make it a temporary measure, just until he recovers," she said in a sing-song tone.

"…I need to eat," he admitted.

Damn right he did. Opening the cupboard, she said, "I'll tell Azazel to start bringing up regular meals again, and this time you won't tell the door not to let him in or order him to stop bothering you. I'd take you down to the cafeteria to make an appearance if you were presentable. You need to eat, sleep, shower and make a public appearance. Honestly, have you forgotten everything you needed to get this position except the programming skills? No one's job is _this _secure, Luther. You need to think about these things. I feel like a jerk when I nag you like this."

"I'll start setting alarms again." To jar him awake when he was deep in thought.

Blair sighed with relief, even though it was obvious that he'd eaten barely any of the snacks in here. At last! He'd finally realized that this was a real problem, not just her being worried about his health. He was perfectly capable of handling it now that she'd managed to get him to remember that job security was a myth, like unicorns and FTL travel.

Both of which existed in the Eternal Sphere, but they lived in the real world. Luther had to keep in mind that if he didn't keep at least one foot in the real world, he wouldn't be able to keep control over the Sphere.

Meanwhile, Luther was mentally kicking himself. Both for making an entire planet in one go, which might be no effort at all when he was using the Eternal Sphere's powers but was clearly a very stupid thing to start with when he was trying to gain control over a dangerous, unstable power that dwelt within and drew at least partially on _his own body_, and for forgetting the reason that he was keeping all of this secret from Blair in the first place.

If they didn't think that he was competent to run the Sphere, they could take his creation (his baby) away from him, just as they would if they realized that he wouldn't destroy his creations when the time came.

This was twice now in two days that everything had almost fallen apart.

He needed to stop thinking about what he _could _do and remember what he _couldn't_.

Because even magic couldn't solve a problem like the Board of Directors. Showing off dangerous, inhuman abilities would just make it worse.

He could resume the conversation with Sophia he'd logged out in the middle of and go back to testing this out once he'd called a press conference to announce some impressive fruit of his labors and made doubly sure he'd done sufficient damage control.

Well, work was work, and at least no one could say he wasn't earning his outrageous salary. Or his phenomenal cosmic powers.


	6. Fry's Day

_Fry's Day. And Fry's sister was…_

_I actually don't think the Freya in SO3 was the same as the one from VP. Her appearance, for one thing, was more than a little creepy. The character model made much more sense after playing Radiata Stories, but in a game with more realistic proportions…_

_Something a class I took pointed out is that the real world and how we perceive stuff isn't really linear. We take in all sorts of data at once, not a bunch of things in sequence. We think with a neural net, not any sort of linear process. Intelligence is fundamentally the ability to make connections and draw conclusions efficiently, and this needs to be figured out._

_Due to her powers, chibi!Sophia was getting a whole ton of mixed signals, and while all of us want the world to make sense, children especially need to make it do so, because getting the world to make sense is a child's job. The human thought process is more akin to hyperlinking than a linear narrative. Think of all the links between pages on Wikipedia: we draw on all sorts of other data to think about anything. Like, when we think about going to the store with someone, we're calling up our data on that person, the priority list of the trip, data on the store in question, logistical information…_

_Sophia's mental model is that framework, which on the one hand is incredibly good for understanding things but on the other is incredibly bad for staying on topic. Sophia is… a bright young girl who cares about people. Letting her look at the connections is like dropping someone in TVTropes. Without the ability to disconnect from the site or close the windows. Then, there's the childhood programming to take in data and fiddle with it in order to understand it- Oooh, lookit the pretty lights! And kittens!_

_It's fun to write that thought process. Being faced with a situation, calling up background data relevant to what sort of thing it would take to cause it and how important it is to fix it, what are her options for dealing with it… and trying not to stare out the window at the birdies. Luther thinks it's adorable, of course, since we tend to judge people by how much they agree with us, and chibi!Sophia thinks that making things that make people happy is the best thing. In societies with apprenticeship, this kind of thing leads to de facto adoption (or even legal adoption): mentoring is important._

_Cuteness is a measure of how much something invokes parental instincts/how worthy it is of being looked after. Given the amount of… not quite fate, but connections between everything going on here, powers at play here, I actually have to wonder whether it was a coincidence or hitsuzen that Luther's first contact with a denizen of the sphere was one so perfectly suited to making him react with, 'I shall teach it, and guide it, and call it Mini-Me!' Kind of like Mirage is to Maria, where it's not a coincidence that they clicked. 'Why doesn't daddy love us?' is a big angst thing in the game, believing themselves rejected by their creator._

* * *

Sophia gasped. "What happened?" The world around her suddenly freezing didn't startle her: she was used to it. She wasn't used to seeing Luther, Ashton, whichever, _bleeding_. Well, not that he was bleeding now, but there was blood on his clothes and this was the battle form he'd shown her. The one that looked more like his real body, except it glowed slightly, had the robes and could grow wings. "Are you alright? Did you get in a fight?" Those were silly questions, really, but they were honest ones. She was a child, after all, and seeing him like this had made her so worried, made her rush up and grab his hand so he didn't go away without telling her what was wrong, leaving her to worry.

So many secrets in her world, so many lies, her father not wanting to look her in the eye but pat her on the head, her mother staying away so she didn't have to look at Sophia and hate herself for bringing her into this world as a tool, Uncle Robert looking at her with a mask that showed nothing but contemplation, searching for something, some sign, some hope and never saying what he wanted to see or what he had found. What she could do.

They were family, they should have been connected to her, but they didn't want to be. She'd known that subconsciously before she was born. She was family, that was a connection, and she was also both a creation of their knowledge and skill and a tool: three ties. Yet they knew they had to be impartial when it came to their tool, their weapon, and they didn't want to look at the girl they had done this to, didn't want to face what they had been forced to do.

She'd _known_: the Connection gene had been in her as her brain developed, nearly from the beginning, unlike Fayt and Maria. It was how she was, as basic as breathing, and like breathing if it wasn't controlled consciously it would be unconsciously. Always there.

She'd wanted to be with them, but they'd wanted to push her away and pull her closer at the same time, and she'd tried to be good so they would only like her instead of tying her down and rejecting her at the same time. Always this feeling that something was wrong, no matter how hard she'd tried to smile.

Then being taken to the lab, and trying to be good while they experimented. Now, she knew that they'd been trying to see whether or not the ability to access 4-d space was there. At the minimum, she would have had to be able to use the Time Gate as a connection point, but then they'd used a photo of it. A recording of that voice, while she was drugged and wouldn't remember, too. The symbol was the thing, after all.

All sorts of symbols inscribed all around the chair, trying to cause the symbol inside her to connect with those images in a certain way, and it had been terrifying. Like having control of her own body taken away from her, some impersonal force using her like a puppet, and this was her father and uncle doing this to her! They wouldn't stop!

There hadn't been any way to get out of it except to go through. They were forcing her to do something, so the only thing she could do was that thing. She'd created that path and she'd flung herself down it, wanting to get away from the sickness and the symbol chains and the feeling of betrayal. The knowledge that this was what it was all about, the wrongness in her family's ties. That this had something to do with why they had always rejected her on some level.

She'd wanted it to stop and she'd wanted to know _why_. Why it was this way and why wasn't there anything she could do to fix it? If they'd not wanted her at all, it would have been easy, but they did so she had to want them back, and it hurt that they also didn't want her.

She knew all sorts of words for this now, kinds of connections and complications, but then there had only been feelings.

There had been somewhere they wanted her to go, the concept of that connection forced into her mind by the symbols, and she'd thought there might be an answer there. Someone there who would answer her, and make it all better.

Or so she'd hoped, but mostly she'd been running, when she flung herself into that world. Out of a very big computer screen, and even though he hadn't been looking up at the time the connection she'd been spelled to strengthen let him catch her, body moving, alerted when she saw him and saw that she was going to crash on him and the desk if she wasn't caught.

Shock/surprise/concern – Where had she come from?

Alarm/condemnation/anger – She'd almost landed on him and the equipment! Who just threw a small child around like that?

Distraction/anticipation/musing – Some part of him was still focused on what he had been doing: it was something very important to him, that he'd been waiting to do for a long time but knew he'd probably still have to fine-tune, run fixes.

Once he took care of the immediate problem, anyway.

Sophia had felt him looking around for two people, only she'd felt it as pinging those connections, seeing if they were there, which they weren't.

She'd already _been _crying when she arrived, from the spell and… everything, even if she'd been startled into stopping when she actually escaped, found herself in this place. Now they started again and she gripped his clothing, not noticing how strange it was. Why did he want her to go away already? Did everybody want her to go away? They _were _connected, she could feel it, and…

That was when her mind's eye opened, all the way, trying to see him and realizing that he was connected to _everybody_. Seeing first that, and then their connections to each other, not just family but love and hate, friendship and bargains. Through all of time, because there was really only _now _in the sphere, so lovers for one night were lovers for all time, and grudges also lasted forever, piled in upon each other in dimensions and tesseracts of far too many…

It was beautiful and horrifying and overwhelming, when she'd already been overwhelmed, had far too much happen that day that she couldn't deal with. So she'd clung to him, and buried her face in his chest, because she wanted to not see, she wanted to hide.

She'd felt his arms tightening around her, felt him wanting to ask what was wrong but she couldn't speak so she tried to show him by letting him feel, except he couldn't see the way she could. His mind wasn't like that. No one's was but hers, she knew now.

The bit he could see made him have to sit down again, after lunging up to catch her, and he'd held her to steady them both. The shock of that made him afraid, which made her more afraid of rejection and not having a hiding place, and that had made him more shocked, and confused, just like her.

Then he'd figured out some of what was going on (he'd told her later that it was called a feedback loop) and started trying to calm himself down, and her down, before they melted down.

She hadn't been held or hugged in a long time, not by anyone but Fayt. He'd wanted to know what she wanted, what would calm her, so she'd let him feel, and that meant feeling what he felt more.

He didn't have any answers for her, he had no idea what was going on, but he'd find out. He wasn't going to put up with poor probably-abused children being thrown into his office and abandoned, it was just outrageous. Security would find out who was responsible for this and whoever it was would lose their job and wish they'd never been born.

She'd been trying to see only him, because that eye wouldn't close again and seeing everything was too overwhelming. So she'd focused on seeing him, thought of seeing what he knew and letting him see the answers to his questions.

It had been very strange to see him think. Pretty, though. It had made her cheer up a bit, watching all the quickquick connections being made and going off in different directions. No, she wasn't trying to trick him, he reassured her that he believed that. This was very strange, though, but… symbology?

He drew it out for her as he thought of it, the connections between him and what was in the computer, the Sphere and her world and her, the symbols her father and uncle had used and what they meant. She wouldn't have been able to understand the words, but she could understand the connections.

Sophia had been so happy, that someone was finally explaining. And that someone was family? It made her start crying again, but a quieter happy crying.

Family, he'd agreed, redefining the creator-creation connection as a family connection as well, only one that wasn't like what she had with her family. She'd wanted to know more about that, so he'd shown her the connection between him and his parents. They'd also wanted to make him be a certain way, because they had hopes, but it wasn't quite using. He certainly hadn't resented them for it and they hadn't felt guilty or been afraid he would. It was like hers, but healthier. She'd liked it much better.

Since that one had cheered her up, he showed her his connection to someone else (big sister), and it was a little like her and Fayt's connection, but much stronger. She wanted one like that. It was a really nice thing, they both were, so she'd tweaked the connection between the two of them so that it was more like that, because when she'd looked at the connections between the two of them some of them had frightened her.

She hadn't recognized destined enemy then. She hadn't been able to look at a connection and say right away that it was the fact her father wanted her to kill her new friend, but they had still been made of fear, anger, protective wrath, self-hatred, yearning, self-doubt, all kinds of terrible things. She didn't want there to be any hurting, not of her new friend/family, so since it wasn't possible to get rid of connections, she made these the strongest so he would be safe and they would stay connected and she could have the nice ties.

Didn't he like the nice connections?

She honestly didn't understand what he was feeling when he reacted with alarm and a bit of (proper) paranoia to suddenly having his emotions tampered with deliberately, as opposed to either a panicked child's projections or her making suggestions. Had she done something wrong? She didn't feel that she did, but she may have? Or he thought she might have?

She'd blinked up at him, and he'd just squeezed her again, having no idea what to say, feel, or show her once again. What she had done wasn't a bad thing, he supposed, but it was certainly something to ask about first.

Even if she had been able to tell through their connection that he wouldn't really mind. Asking mattered. Connections mattered, right?

He wasn't able to draw out the connections between the consent issues, rights and emotions for her because it was just feelings for him, at that point. He looked it up and drew it out for her later, though.

Then, he'd started thinking of safeguards, and if there was some way to keep her from having to see so much she was overwhelmed. Then he'd realized that she was going to have to go back to her family, that had done this to her. Go back inside his creation. People in there.

At that point, the connections and emotions about them had started happening so fast between so many things she really hadn't been able to follow them, but she was exhausted from what had happened anyway, so she didn't mind closing her eyes while he thought. It was pretty.

He was surprised by the 'pretty' description, so she tried to draw connections to what it make her think of. Like kollideascopes? Or… Um, she didn't know what exactly it was like. It was pretty, though. She liked it.

Of course she wouldn't hurt him, and she knew he wouldn't hurt her. That was the nice family connections, and she really liked that. She wanted that, he didn't have to ask.

He'd wondered what was making seeing all of it so hard for her, and she tried to draw out the complexity before he took the barely-sketched diagram and just crunched it together, showing her that what she had thought was a lot of complicated different things was all one thing. Yes, if all time was one thing that made it much simpler, she didn't have to try to figure out where 'now' was relative to the beginning and end of the manifestation of every single connection from the temporal perspective. Not unless it mattered at the time. She'd been trying to orient herself in way too many directions at once when they were imaginary directions, too. Like seasickness, but much, much worse.

Or something, it took her awhile to understand because the connection of 'this equals this' didn't help if she didn't understand the second this either. She just let him define a lot of things as things she didn't need to worry about right then, because she trusted him.

Even now, there were still a lot of things that she grasped in terms of connections but hadn't put into words yet. She'd gotten in the habit of saying even things that most people thought were sort of obvious out loud, just to be sure they weren't too weird and that she was putting them in the right words.

According to Luther, most people thought in words, made sentences, instead of the connections between things. Sometimes she seemed a little slow, because she had to translate from how she saw things to how other people did, and remember what of what she saw they wouldn't see and what she had to pretend she didn't know because an ordinary person wouldn't have seen it, but that was alright. Luther had assured her that she had a few years before she needed to learn how to impress people in order to try to get a job. Although she wouldn't have to fight here, and he'd make sure she had whatever she needed to do whatever she wanted.

Because, as he'd showed her then, the thing in the computer that was her world was his precious creation, his masterpiece, every hope and joy and wonderful thing bundled up, trying to make something that would _live _and, "_It's alive, alive!"_ he thought, drawing a connection to a story of creating life from something else and laughing inside, smiling outside, feeling happy enough to consider getting up, spinning around, tossing her up in the air and catching her, although she'd been tossed around enough for one day and she was tired. She was happy that everything had gone so well though, or he'd gotten some unexpected good luck… She was good luck? A gift? A nice surprise, instead of a bad one?

At the time, he had just been so happy that the Eternal Sphere was working and there had been this miracle, a bit of magic in a world without it. A bit of magic that he was responsible for.

It hadn't taken him long to figure out what had made her father and uncle so worried, and that made him worried, but he didn't reject her because of it. He just started drawing more lines and connections and protections, things to keep her safe. To keep everyone safe. He hadn't wanted her to tell anyone about him, but that was alright. She'd been afraid of what would happen if he met them, perhaps because of what she saw in the connections and perhaps because she didn't want him to become like them, and start blaming himself, beating himself up at the thought of her and not wanting to think of her because of that.

A shared secret was also a connection.

Luther dealt with words and concepts, connecting them together to make things. Like programs. Like plans. Like her world.

Really, she thought that what Maria had done was right, except for the fact that she hadn't asked first, because the connections she'd seen had added up to enemy and thus to way to save her people. It fit, and Luther had been excited, telling her about making the planet once he'd come back the day before. Then about making dragons, and how he'd felt like playing around and testing if he could use this in battle by making anvils fall on the dragon's heads, like in cartoons.

He liked making things. New connections, all the time. People in the Sphere did that too, but the world ran on symbols, underneath everything.

Now he had a symbol too, he was more like her. And Fayt, but they were even more family now. Maria had just made him who he would have been here, too, so that explained why he seemed more right now. Like this was the way he should be. He'd already been connecting his thought to the Sphere more, thinking in symbols so it could understand. He liked the Sphere so the Sphere liked him. She wasn't doing anything with their connection, but it was interesting to watch. He was showing the Sphere things, helping it make connections, all the time. That was how he was, really.

It had seemed right that he had a power equal to hers, or better. Since he was older and wiser and everything. It was the one he'd always wanted, too.

She wondered if a person like that would have to be born with that symbol in their dna here. Supposedly only Expellians did, but symbols made up _everything_. So they had to be _there, _just not useful for symbology. Encrypted, that was the word. Encrypted in the shape of DNA, the molecules, so people didn't see that it was all programming so easily. Players, too. Graphics. Like the animation of the bird she was doing. Fayt had said he'd find out how to project it in his game holo room, too, and then it could fly around and they could touch it and stuff, once she learned textures. It would be like a pet. She didn't know how to give it a mind yet, but watching Luther and the Sphere was interesting.

It would take a long time to do the rest of the stuff for their bird, anyway.

Symbology was easy, though. It was just memorization, and that was easy when she could just create a connection between the symbological formula and the effect. Once she figured out how to make connections between theoretical effects and any spells that existed, she wouldn't need to be told new ones at all.

Luckily, she knew a healing one. Or was a clothes-cleaning one better, because he was healed already? She didn't know any clothes-cleaning ones. He surely could, so the fact he hadn't meant that the bad thing that had happened wasn't over and it was an emergency and what if whatever bad person had attacked him tried again? She wouldn't let them!

"Sophia? Sophia, calm down." Luther had to kneel down to look her in the eye and put his hands on her shoulders to get her attention, get him to look at him. "Sophia, you need to calm down… and put those back where you found them." At first his voice was soothing, but the second part was sharper.

"But…" But he'd been hurt!

"Put them back right _now,_ young lady."

"But…"

"Sophia Esteed, what have I told you about summoning executioners?" He said slowly and clearly, drawing it out. She should know this already.

"They are for erasing bugs in the system and dealing with really bad people." Not, for example, giving her a ride home when she missed the bus, since it caused panic, or providing company when she was lonely, since they were so big they broke things in the apartment, like load-bearing walls. "But you were hurt!"

Luther made another mental note that he really had to create something else, something that wasn't just smaller but obviously more powerful. Sophia would obviously go for the big guns if she thought it was serious, and apparently children kept thinking that everything the adults didn't know what to do about was the end of the world, and it was hard to get her to believe that it wouldn't be when, actually, if anything went wrong the end of the world was a very real possibility and she was smart enough to know it. "It's alright, I've dealt with it, I just need your help for one little thing."

What did he need her to do? What could she do to help, so he wouldn't be hurt or go away?

"First, I need you to calm down and put the executioners back." He hadn't even tried ordering them to turn off, not when this was Sophia and she was this upset and determined. At least he'd frozen this place already: he'd just restore it to before he'd frozen it and before the executioners had done things like clip the side of the Applied Biology building with a wing and send the skyscraper falling to the ground or try perching on things that weren't designed for spaceship-sized (and even heavier) behemoths with really sharp claws. As Luther, he was well aware that no one would actually be hurt by any of that destruction: they wouldn't have felt a thing while paused and it was simple to put it all back. As Ashton, he couldn't help but think of this as 'real life' and be hit with how many people would have died just now, including people he knew.

While it was good that the immersion was working and he would probably react properly instead of callously to what would certainly happen a few years from now? He, like Sophia, needed to _focus_, not worry about… he didn't want to call them _friends _per se, after what Sophia had pointed out, but he'd almost gone into Applied Biology, as a roundabout way of approaching Dr. Leingod's interest in symbological genetics, before his undergraduate advisor had made him realize that if he studied something he wasn't especially interested in, the experts _would _pick up on that, and an ounce of real feeling was worth a pound of strategy. The best lies were made up of as much truth as humanly possible. People didn't make it here unless they were obsessed with and loved their field: this university held the best of the best among trillions. He actually was fascinated by Drs. Leingod and Esteed's work, so he'd tried to stop trying to seem perfect, stop playing the metagame as he'd grown up playing it, and he actually thought the part that had hooked Leingod, although he was a paranoid and slippery fish (and hooking and reeling in were two different things), was the time he'd let himself be bossly at some people for being lazy and leaving something for the custodians that wasn't their damn job.

He'd thought it was both horribly embarrassing and a massive slip at the time, but it wasn't like they knew anything about 4d culture, now was it?

He still knew everyone in Applied Biology that mattered, because if being interested in both symbology and genetics might have been a red flag, just dropping those connections wouldn't have seemed very friendly, now would it? The whole point was to seem trustworthy. The people there were also doing a few things relevant to his interests, especially character design.

…He was going to have to give in and raise the level cap, wasn't he. He'd wanted the Eternal Sphere to be _realistic, _not someplace that encouraged excess grinding or other means of becoming overpowered, but it was clear that not everyone had his principles.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure." The executioners, as they were, wouldn't have done all much good if she'd broken loose and come after him anyway. "There, that's better. Sophia, I gave you access to them for emergencies. You can't just use them at the drop of a hat…" Well, telling her that wasn't going to work. She was right, technically. It _had _been an emergency. "The Sphere was invaded again."

"…Oh." Now Sophia felt silly. "I'm sorry for panicking. Did you have fun?"

Luther opened his mouth to reply, then paused, because while his initial reaction was to say no, that wasn't really an honest answer. In real life, it was probably a sort of mental illness to enjoy that kind of thing, what with all the agony of the injuries and what would have happened if he'd lost, but he'd been running on an endorphin high the whole time, and he was probably still a little high off the thrill of victory. The challenge of a direct, honest fight, the adrenaline that came from a real threat, the feeling of being _alive_, of beating an ungodly difficult opponent? No one who didn't understand that had the right to call themselves a game designer.

Also, the honest answer was the one that would reassure Sophia. "Yes. She was harder than they usually are, though."

"You've got blood on your robes," Sophia said, and Luther wanted to facepalm. What an idiotic thing to forget to fix, of course she'd panicked.

"It's not mine," he told Sophia, and actually that was the literal truth. While _plenty _of his blood had gotten on his robes during the fight, that had all been fixed by the use of an _entirely _broken auto-regeneration and auto-life spell that was _only _supposed to be used by people who were debugging, so they could survive the occasionally lethal bug or just run through an area without having to slow down and care about the enemies present. It was a good thing he'd had the presence of mind to create a debugging tool, otherwise he wouldn't have survived long enough to figure out what to create in order to defeat her. The blood must have gotten on him when he'd picked her up after _finally _taking her down.

She was so short, and the proportions were off. Who had thought _that _was a good idea? Not to mention that she was child-sized, and certain things were very much not childish. Whoever had created her had a lot to answer for, but frankly, he wasn't up to it. Fending off challenges and attacks from competitors, sure. That was all part of the game, and he generally incorporated it into the game. Another fun little thing for the PCs, to get them to defend this universe. To think of it as something to defend.

"Who did it this time?"

"Someone from another universe."

Sophia blinked up at him. That was new. Usually it was jealous people, either from other companies or those who had been unable to get jobs and resented his good fortune.

"She called herself Freya. There was a goddess by that name, but I doubt she's the same being." Or had the people of her universe tried to invade his and been fought off? Who would have done something like that? "Utterly, utterly broken stats and techniques." It was almost offensive. She had been so, so _cheap_. Normally, if he'd been among university students, he might have made a comment relating that cheapness to her clothing involving the phrase 'five fol whore,' but given that Freya had looked underage and Sophia was, he certainly wasn't going to say that now.

Well, an invasion was war, not a game, and in an actual war, the point was to win with the minimum number of casualties on your side. Fair was _not _fair, in war.

"But you won, right?"

"I cheated," he said, and then thought better of it. It wasn't cheating in a real fight. He had the regen, he'd used the regen, he'd won, and Sophia's world hadn't been taken over by someone who put women the size of children with porportions like that into clothing like that and sent them to invade other universes.

The thought of that removed any feelings of guilt he might possibly have ever had.

Forget 60, forget 99, he was raising the level cap to_ two_ hundred. Now that they'd finally launched the new galaxy/server, he needed a new project anyway. The newsies were already speculating. Upgraded executioners, more bonus bosses, laxer oversight on the item crafting standards (let them invent cheap gear and think they were slipping it past him/had come up with something clever) would make them do it for him…

Yes, a tournament; that would be the best way to launch the new changes. They had a planet, alone in the vastness of space, set aside for people who wanted to get together to chat, show off, and do PVP. Create some bonus bosses there, and give himself bonus boss stats, perhaps be the final challenge in the tournament? For now, though, "Can you help me figure out how she got into this universe?" Help him find that hole in his security, how the connection between his Sphere and the universe she'd come from had been made, so he could slam it shut.

For now, he had Freya sealed in sleep and locked in one of the experimental bonus dungeons on Aquaria, the ones they used for testing and debugging. Since this world was real, Luther had been cautious when it came to creating too-powerful beings, which was why a new type of executioner was going to take a lot of thought.

He was probably going to have to deal with whoever sent Freya eventually, but ideally that would only take place _after _the two universes that were his problem were safe. He didn't need distractions like this.

Well, it really had been a fantastic boss battle, but that wasn't the _point. _It had also given him more than a few ideas, but it wasn't like more power would help his real problems. Even if it _would _be really easy to conquer his world… He shook his head, chastising himself for those thoughts. The potential for conquest and destruction was the problem, dammit. He'd been resisting raising the level cap for _years _because his creations were too powerful already. However, if they were going to be fighting people who were an actual threat?

That made him wonder how likely it was that someone would try to conquer his own universe after the two universes became separated, and if it was right to leave it undefended before he realized that, right, no one would want it. One planet and a few space stations and mining ships and such in a big, cold, dead universe: who would waste their time conquering a place like that when there were decent universes out there? Obviously his Eternal Sphere was real estate of _far _higher quality.


	7. Saturn's Day

_Saturn's Day._

_In case you're wondering about the temporal stuff in here, remember, 4d. Does this fic take place over a week and a day? The answer is both yes and no. The game doesn't really do anything with the potential for time travel inherent in 4d: they could have gone and saved Dr. Leingod, for example._

_From Sophia's POV, this takes place over a week and a day. However, most of the days written up in the fic take place in different timelines, especially on Tuesday, when changes in 4d's timeline changed the ES's, which changed 4d… If it weren't for all the powers involved, the level of paradox and cascading timelines would probably have Blue Screen of Death'd both universes. (Divide by cucumber error: please reinstall universe and reboot.) The universes had to be saved before the timeline changes eliminated the people able to save them._

_From Luther's perspective, it took place over a few months, since he had to do a lot of actual work and such. During the first few days he was trying not to, so Sunday-Wednesday synced up pretty well. Normally the ratio varies a lot, depending on what's going on in both worlds. He's also building up his reputation as an eccentric/semi-recluse-workaholic in 4d. On the other hand, as the fic summary says, since he's establishing a cover identity he basically has to have a social life in the ES._

_I have been unable to locate an official birthdate for Ryoko Leingod. I really hope it's sometime in the summer/early fall._

_I have a few references to stuff in earlier chapters in here, especially The Things People In The Eternal Sphere Think It Is Ok To Name Their Kids. Because come on, like PCs aren't giving themselves Mary Sue/Gary Stu names. Destyne isn't a PC, I just wanted something that would point out just how bad Fayt is. And then there's poor Leeroy, who has no idea his name isn't fairly awesome._

_Stuff that is not happy stuff happens in this chapter. If you don't want, feel free to skip._

* * *

Most people's reaction to a birthday party held in their honor would not be to inwardly sigh and wish they could ask, "Do I have to go?" Well, of course she could _ask,_ but she knew the answer so it really wouldn't be anything more than whining.

The one consolation was that this wouldn't be a real birthday party. The answer to the question, "Why do they have to throw a birthday party for me?" was, as usual, "Because it's a lot easier to reserve one of the event rooms for the birthday of a department head's wife than because a lot of grad students want to get drunk and bond in the face of the impending realization that ninety percent of them are going to become suspicious rivals at best and bitter enemies at worst."

There was an official little graduation shindig for the department, but since they also had this lifetime achievement award honoring former graduates then, it was actually what set this off.

This was a research university. It trained researchers. The galaxy's best and brightest, powered by the raw hunger to _know_.

And there were only so many positions and so much grant money out there. Oh, any of them could find a high-paying job easily, but no one who was in it for _that _would ever be given one of the few dozen precious slots. No, it was a university post, a government post, a few cutting edge companies or a wasted life, from their perspective. The former alumni and colleagues they met were on the one hand talent scouts they needed to impress and people who had what they wanted.

Robert's predecessor had trained at another university, and while he'd continued the tradition of having one last fling as people were leaving, he hadn't really grasped the _point_. He would have held it in Ashton's honor, the way he'd held it in Robert's, and Robert had spent that whole evening, long ago now, with death glares trained on his back, for getting a position here so easily. Normally, people had to spend a few years doing something prestigious as a professor at another university before they even _thought _about applying for an assistant professorship here. It had rubbed in the fact that this was a competition and some of them were outclassed.

It had been bad enough for Robert, and no one could really say that Robert hadn't earned it. They all knew that he was brilliant, they'd all seen his work. Ashton was good, but he wasn't_ that_ good. The rumor was that he'd been picked because the administration had gotten on Dr. Leingod's back again about the fact that this was also a teaching university and the symbology department had an abysmal ratio of classes taught by professors to classes (and discussion sections) taught by grad students (due to the fact that most students needed to go over the same material several times in order to grasp it). Dr. Esteed was doing his best to encourage the idea that Ashton had been picked because he was one of only a handful of them who didn't groan or bang their head against the wall after dealing with the people in the intro courses who could have it explained to them in words of one syllable fifteen times over and _still _not get it and ask incredibly stupid questions and write bad performance reviews because of their own inability to grasp (what the grad students considered) simple concepts.

If they thought it was bad here, wait until they got out there and found that there were universities that accepted students with IQs under 130 and had these arcane professor-torturing customs called 'breadth requirements.' It was bad enough dealing with science students who were trying to learn a little about a related area or art students who were here for the symbol aspect. At least no one was in the discussion sections who didn't want to learn the material. They weren't even mandatory. If a student flunked because they didn't attend the review, that was their problem.

At least they could comfort themselves with the idea Ashton was going to be doing wall-to-wall classes, scrambling to find time to publish and avoid perishing until The Grant Proposal finally got accepted, at which point he'd be on research sabbatical and Robert would be looking for someone else to teach those classes…

Of course, the reason Ashton had been hired that wasn't a rumor but all but officially confirmed was that he'd been smart enough to let himself be used for babysitting non-students. It was an object lesson, really. You could be the smartest, most reliable person in the world and it wouldn't help you get hired if no one knew that. Professors had codes for when they were asked to write a letter of recommendation for someone they didn't recommend, but not everyone knew everyone's codes. Knowing someone personally or hearing about them from someone whose opinion you trusted was the best way. Making connections mattered.

If they didn't find out that symbologic genius would only take them so far now, it would come as a horrible shock when they finally figured out why they kept getting turned down.

Which was why she had to stand in front of the mirror like this and put pearls in her ears like the standard issue department chair's spouse, the ones that were called Mistresses regardless of gender since everyone knew that anyone who had gotten to where Leingod was had to be married to their passion for discovery, above all else.

Showing them how to play the game, because if they didn't learn how to handle the social scene, host parties, make contacts and so on? If they didn't become their own career manager they'd better marry one.

At least her actual birthday was still a long way off, and the only old colleagues who would be present were ones too tactful to say anything.

About the fact that once upon a time, she and Robert had been what they were still calling a threesome, the couple that was bound together by a mutual passion for research. Once upon a time, she'd been a rising star among the graduate students, an up-and-coming young faculty member.

Once upon a time, people had addressed her by her last name and remembered her first, instead of just calling her Mrs. Leingod. She doubted more than a few of the young ones even knew that she had letters after her name.

Well, she'd known what to expect. She'd never come back from that sabbatical, she'd taken a leave of absence to raise her son, and they'd only held her position for her for so long. She was rusty, and she knew it, and they knew it, and they knew she knew it, the few who remembered her. The ones who exclaimed when they saw her at functions, over how long it had been, had she gone back to doing anything worthwhile with her life…

At first, she'd been one of the Three Date Rule cautionary tales. To get as far as she had and have it be for nothing? She'd wasted over a decade, the university had wasted one of its precious slots on her, all because she'd let her uterus and hormones boss her around and ruin her life.

Much, much better to have them look at her and see a competent social manager and hostess. For the first few years after they'd returned, before Robert had become department head, the graduate students' smiles when they met her were plastered on, a hint of fear in their eyes, in their voices, that _this could be them_. If they didn't hustle, if they didn't struggle to get ahead, they too might be unable to make it.

To be thought a mere housewife was far less demeaning than to be a fallen scientist.

So she was putting on makeup and dabbing on perfume, wearing a dress and she'd enter on Robert's arm and see if she could spot anyone who had dug up old gossip. Done their homework.

At least Sophia's mother wouldn't be there. She hadn't had to sacrifice her career, and for a few years there Ryoko had come perilously close to hating her, and Robert. Even though she knew what to blame.

Robert was standing stiffly in the bathroom doorway, and Ryoko admitted to herself that part of why she was taking so long with this wasn't just putting on her armor but making him squirm. He _hated _watching her do this. It made him coldly furious to watch the ones who _knew _talk down to her, either plastic smiles hiding content or trying to stifle a wide grin and keep from laughing at her.

This wasn't what they'd wanted, it wasn't what they'd dreamed of when they'd gone to study the Time Gate. He'd taken paternity leave after Fayt was born so that she could get back to work right away and undo the damage missing those months had caused. They'd hired a nanny and staggered their schedules.

Then the end of the world had been announced, and they'd made Fayt what he was, and she'd seen it all in one horrified instant as stray symbols formed around him.

They couldn't trust a nanny with an illegal symbiological weapon. They couldn't leave a child with the power of destruction home alone half the time the way the Esteeds could Sophia. Robert needed to stay on top of things, make sure no one was working on a way to detect what they'd done, other projects that could ruin everything. They might have been able to suppress Fayt eventually, but he wouldn't have been sent to first grade if she hadn't been watching him and not seen any symbols appear for over a year and a half. Since they couldn't send him to preschool, someone needed to teach him. The savior of the universe couldn't be an idiot, he needed a mind capable of understanding the power he wielded. That required an early start.

At least he'd been able to start first grade. She might have had to be homeschooling him even now.

It was what had to be done, so she'd done it.

Yet even if she got credit for saving the universe (she doubted it, no one remembered the housewives) there would be no way to make up for the years she'd missed. She wouldn't be able to go back to research, not a real position, not the real cutting edge. They'd already agreed that Robert would get all the credit for the work on Fayt and she would pretend she was just the wife and didn't know much about it, because getting all the credit meant taking all the blame, and once the dust had settled, if anyone of them were still alive, they would still have created a living weapon that could destroy planets as easily as beakers and lab rats. Heroes or not, the government would have to do _something_.

The Voice had spoken, heralding the end of the world, and it had shattered her world. The brush that swept on powder was a broom sweeping away the shards of her dreams.

It wasn't Robert's fault. He still felt responsible, and frankly, if he hadn't, if he hadn't hated himself for not being able to keep this from happening to her, prevent her from having to ape this stereotype she really would have hated him.

It was masochistic of him, really, not to shuffle his feet or point out that he was ready to go, to just stand there watching her put on a mask, keep up appearances. Because if people assumed she was just another woman who had stopped living her own life to sacrifice herself for a child or a man, then they wouldn't wonder why she'd sacrificed everything. Wouldn't realize that yes, there actually was a good reason.

Perhaps it was sadistic of her to feel fond of him now, watching him squirm behind that poker face. It was certainly masochistic of her to be putting all this on for graduate students and recently-ex-graduate students. This wasn't a real event, just a façade.

Like the makeup. Like Mrs. Leingod. Like Robert's stoic expression as he looked at her, asking if she hated him when she finally turned around. She put her hand on his arm to reassure him. "It's fine. Let's just have fun tonight. Just remember that you're not a graduate student anymore."

Here she was, gently reminding him that he was getting older. How wifely. Especially since she already knew that he wouldn't really listen, and she'd end up driving him home after he spent the evening letting his hair down, being approachable, reliving the days when they had been on that stairway to heaven, every step to their dreams right after the other. Too busy not thinking about now to watch how much he had, or reject people's offers of mixed drinks.

Drowning his sorrows. Well, they'd have to leave early to take Fayt home, anyway.

They really were like an old married couple.

How many years had it been now, since the Voice? Since she'd helped turn her son into a killing machine? How many days until her birthday?

She should have been sad when her birthday came, thinking of another year gone by, one that could never be reclaimed, but honestly, by this point she'd become numb enough it wasn't really more than mildly surprising that she'd made it another year without the universe being destroyed by its Creator or her son killing her.

Wouldn't that be appropriate? The sin of patricide. Fayt's life would be ruined because of this, it would only be natural for him to resent them. To kill his parents for toying with him as they would have killed their own creator using him. Robert was planning to take all the blame. She knew he expected to die, and he knew she knew.

She didn't know if she would stand next to him and say that it was her fault as well, list the contributions to the project she'd made, how she knew enough about symbological genetics, even now, to make another one like Fayt. That she was just as dangerous as Robert. That whatever her son suffered was just as much her fault.

She did know that when she was younger, she would have insisted on it. Demanded credit for her own work, demanded that they acknowledge that she might not be Robert Leingod but she was still a genius in her own right.

Perhaps it was raising children and watching year after year of innocent grad students start to learn about the real world that had made that pride seem so petty. They were fighting for their lives. Whatever got the job done. Better to be underestimated than overestimated. If the Creator knew they were a real threat, they wouldn't have this chance.

Fayt was already in the car, excited as always. The parties that weren't formal dinners were always fun for him, because half the time people got into one-upmanship or started telling jokes and there was food and a floor show. A few of the professors had gotten symbology licenses and Ashton wasn't the only Expellian, so at some point someone would end up providing a light show with a little more than just parlor tricks involved.

* * *

While someone randomly draping themselves on you wasn't a rare occurrence at this kind of party, normally they either put their hands over your eyes and asked, "Guess who?" or did it later in the evening, mildly tipsy and high on fellowship. Well, desperately simulated fellowship sometimes at this time of year, especially as word had trickled through the grapevine and everyone else had started telling themselves that they were _not _jealous of Ashton's good fortune and he was still their friend.

What Sophia had said about him and friends was still nagging at him. It really wasn't fair to think of them like people back home. They were trying so hard not to be vicious sharks, and he needed to remember to think of their occasional strategems or losses to temptation as cute instead of actual threats to his position that needed to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

Hmm? "Cassandra?" He wouldn't have remembered her perfume if it weren't for the accidental conjuration incident with the flower, when he was figuring that out… a couple days ago, from her perspective. "Third date already?" The invitations for formal (and fake formalish) things always included date, and sometimes not bringing one was an invitation for people from other departments to crash in your name. He wondered if anyone in sociology was researching the complex rules of party attendance (free food!) and favor-cashing, but no, they'd know better than to give the game away.

"I'm here with Leeroy," she said. "Or maybe I should make this the third date. I'm going to have to take a raincheck on the botanical gardens tomorrow, anyway. Interview."

"Oh?"

"Interview." She put her finger to her lips, a silent hush.

"On short notice like that?" Something hush-hush on short notice? "That's wonderful." Either she was almost a shoo-in for something or she was getting her clearance boosted.

"Either that or I'm in big trouble." Her smile as she half-shrugged indicated probably not. "Maybe Wednesday?"

"Can't. The intro staff-fighting course doesn't start until next month, but I have to run through some things with the assistants and we got assigned the new volunteers from the med school for some alleged reason."

"They'll get more practice when it's amateurs that are hitting each other with sticks," Cassandra said.

"That's why I said alleged reason. Anyway, it's the students from the community who are most likely to sue if anything serious happens, like an instructor not blocking a bad blow or a rookie medic healing the resulting broken bone up wrong, and being in charge of the class means I'm liable too." Joy. "I can do Friday."

"There's a catered event for the vice-chancellor Friday." She patted him on the shoulder. "I like you, but I like the little white-and-dark chocolate strawberry cheesecake bites more. Raincheck?"

"You're right, I can't compete with that." He mimed heartbreak. "Raincheck." They were both on limited stipends, after all.

How had Leeroy met someone in Applied Biology, he wondered as she waved bye for now and wandered off to say hello to someone else. He'd already been snapped up by a starship design firm with a year to go, for crying out loud. Not much for the soft sciences, or even the squishy.

Leeroy… he really needed to remember that the name wasn't funny here.

The food was brought out mercifully quickly (both Leingods knew why the students were here), and then the wandering-around-with-plates and drinks began in earnest. He had to remind himself not to powermingle, just say hi to a few people and grab another chair before anyone noticed that he'd barely touched the wine. Possibly giving the people of the Eternal Sphere higher alcohol tolerances had been a mistake. It meant they brewed, distilled, whatever, stronger stuff. Rigging up the biofeedback necessary to 'be' tired when his avatar should be tired, so he didn't make the mistake of being chipper at 6am or anything equally OOC had been complicated even with Sophia's help, and the first time he'd indulged in social drinking he'd assumed that his limit would be the same and gotten drunk when he should have been perfectly fine.

Meh, it wasn't as though having a reputation as a lightweight was a bad thing. Most PCs made use of the fact that they didn't get drunk in order to impress people and have fun at parties: the fact Ashton was a semi-wallflower because he did would indicate that he wasn't a PC, if he screwed up enough that anyone took a serious look at the character. It was even on the lists of how to tell if someone was another PC that floated around the net.

Nope, sticking to the soft drinks.

Speaking of which, he should warn the new guy.

Fortunately, by the time he was dragged over to where the others were gathering to be egged into doing tricks, Professor Ackermann was doing it for him. "Know why the rule is that if you do a trick, they bring you a drink?"

"Why?" he asked, looking slightly intimidated by the fact this was _the _Professor Destyne Ackermann, author of countless books etc. etc. If he didn't get over that quickly, he was going to be stammering through his first semester. People who did their undergrad work in the back of beyond were often amusing like that.

"Partially, it's as payment and to replenish our energy. Mostly, it's to get us drunk," Ashton chimed in, moving his chair so that he had a clear view of one of the punch bowls. "In the hope something funny happens."

"Like anvils," call-me-Destyne-since-we're-colleagues-now agreed cheerfully.

He raised an eyebrow at her. "It's not funny if it's your foot that gets smashed," he informed the kid. "Of course, that was me. You don't need to be as paranoid as I'm going to be."

"You hit your foot?"

"No, I hit a piano." He winced: _that_ had been expensive to repair. "Anyway, you don't need to be as paranoid as I'm going to be. It's become a running joke. You'll get used to those." The university was full of odd traditions.

What? "That implies that you can spike drinks and _not _die here."

Destyne nodded. "It depends on the party and what's going on. Also what it's spiked with. Sealed bottles and cans are always fine. At frat parties, it's seriously illegal." And one-on-one and other situations where people might be at risk. "Trying to get the competing symbologists drunk is a tradition, part of the informal contest we're having." On planets where it was easier to get licensed, often they'd have the winner of each round take a drink as a handicap, for example.

In his world, where people could be allergic to alcohol or all kinds of things, the casual attitude they had here towards adding alcohol (in small quantities, by local standards) or other substances of the fun or harmless prank variety would get people killed.

"If you tell people not to, then it's rude," Ashton added. "You're new, so people are going to want to get to know you. Fair warning."

"In vino veritas?"

Destyne waved that off. "More like how you act when drunk, sleep-deprived, angry or hung-over. That's very important to know about a potential lab partner."

"Start already!" The person who yelled that was both safely anonymous and probably in another department.

"How did you get licensed?" Ashton wondered as Destyne led off with the smoke rings and tigers to jump through them. She did that every year.

"The symbols? I've had them on me since I was a child. My world only recently joined."

"So… two reasons for them not to license you."

"License?"

"The Federation's a little nervous about symbology users. We're heavily armed all the time, and this is the capital. Old Earth itself. The homeworld, the… You know, all the touristy stuff. I get nervous looks in the streets, but they can't really refuse to allow Expellians to immigrate here, it would be begging for a huge civil rights lawsuit. The Federation will make adults jump through hoops and go through background checks before they'll even consider allowing them to put symbols on their bodies, and someone from a planet that's not central Federation? There's a lot of military research at this university. A _lot._ What made them let you in? Are you a prince or something?"

"Close. I'm not, Father is. Our country is a principality."

"That explains it." Wow, yeah. It would take something like that.

Once Fayt was done advancing his future scientific career (he didn't know what he wanted to do yet, so he was being precocious at everyone, even if it actually was just because he was curious), he and Sophia came over and the competition really got started, even if Ashton had to bow out early because Destyne had more experience and the new guy knew a lot of flashy tricks. Well, politics.

A little before midnight Dr. Leingod came by to collect Fayt, having got to the point where it was clear that he was being _determinedly _cheerful.

He hated it when he got like that. It made him feel guilty and he had to hide that he knew that there was a reason the man was acting that way. At least Robert had only looked at him long enough to nod, a bit unsteadily, before folding his arms on the back of Destyne's chair and watching the new one, who had already been dubbed Prince, the poor guy, conjure a firebird.

"Fayt?" Ryoko leaned down a bit, closer to his level. "Time to go."

"But Mom…" Fayt pouted.

"No buts. Time to go. Sophia and her father are going now too." Sophia had been cheering on Professor Ackermann, or all three of them, really.

"But they haven't got to the funny part yet!" Fayt said petulantly, not moving when Ryoko took his arm and tugged on it, until he grabbed it back. "Let go!"

"Fayt, stop that. I'm surprised at you." Ryoko might have been willing to get Robert a cab home and stay a little longer if Fayt had wanted, but she wasn't going to reward behavior like this. Fayt was an even-tempered boy, he hadn't thrown a tantrum in years. If she was still a scientist, she would have wondered if that was a side effect of subconsciously trying to control his power. Glaring at her like this, moving like that? "What's gotten into you?"

Luther was frankly wondering the same thing as he looked at the scene. The only reason he could think of for Fayt to actually be angry at Ryoko was that she'd embarrassed him again earlier in the week. One of these years, Fayt might figure out that Ryoko actually was trying to keep him from having close friends or becoming popular at school. He'd probably think that she was just too clingy when it came to her baby or something. Ryoko could act, Luther acknowledged. Still, Fayt had reason to resent her, not that he could possibly know the half of it.

Luther's eyes widened in shock as Ryoko grabbed for Fayt's arm again, more firmly this time. Discipline was one thing, but she had to know what she was manhandling-

"Leave me alone!" Fayt cried, and it was only in hindsight that Luther realized that he'd sounded _childish_. No, not just childish. This was the way he'd sounded years ago, when Luther had first met him, the age at which they'd started experimenting with him and Sophia's abilities.

Profanity was entirely inadequate for what happened next, and pausing to say it, or even think it, would likely have been fatal.

He felt Sophia, who had also seen it, grab on to him and Fayt, which would have been a better idea if it hadn't kept Fayt from being frozen along with the rest of the guests, and the planet, as the symbols finished manifesting. Or would freezing Fayt in time have stopped it?

No.

Overriding Sophia's tap of his own root access didn't stop it. Nothing he could do would, after all.

Fayt's power was designed as the counter to his. Even as the boy, the symbiological weapon, stood frozen, the symbols that were his power flared and focused and _struck_.

He'd expected error messages. For the Eternal Sphere to notice that something wasn't right. That something was _gone_. That an NPC program, no, a _person_ had just been not deleted (sent to the recycle bin, he had precautions since it would be odd if the other programmers couldn't do something so basic), not killed and queued for reincarnation according to the algorithms he'd set up to try to create some kind of fairness, but was just gone.

No error messages. No _nothing_.

No dispersal of data that he might have backtracked, recalculated, pieced together. No…

Under other circumstances he might have said, "I knew it." Fayt had gotten the backups. They'd tested him on objects and small animals: Luther had extra precautions for people. Briefly, he considered trying to travel back in his own universe's time. He could ask Sophia to try… No, that would get her hopes up and it wouldn't have a prayer of working.

Fayt's power was the one Dr. Leingod and the others had _focused _on.

He couldn't ask Sophia if there was anything she could do. That would give her the idea that she was expected to do something, that she had a _prayer _of doing something, and then she'd blame herself. Part of him thought that it would be better, in the long run, for their survival, for her to feel guilty and hate herself than for her to hate him for failing (apparently it was a kid thing, to think that the people they looked up to could do anything, and that meant that when they couldn't it could mean that they just weren't trying, or were refusing to), but Sophia couldn't hate him. That was part of how her power worked, she understood others too well for hate.

A pity that didn't apply to herself.

Part of him was wondering if he could cover this up. Tamper with her memories or something, but he couldn't hide that a connection had been severed.

He'd expected that Sophia would be tugging at his coat and asking him if he could bring Aunt Ryoko back, but from the way she stood there she already knew, didn't she. Because he knew.

He could create something to take her place, to fill that gap in their lives, but it wouldn't be _her_. Just a placeholder.

For a moment there, he'd thought Fayt had been drinking from the cups on the table by Ashton's chair, the ones he'd refused to touch. That it was his fault for not warning him that not all alcohol was icky and bitter the way Fayt still thought wine was. Or that Cassandra had been invited because she'd been dabbling in one of the less legal aspects of applied biology and someone had thought it would be funny to literally drug the punch. Or someone had tried to… Well, better conspiracy theories than thinking that Fayt had just up and decided to do this. No, he knew the boy better than that.

It had been so hard for them to make him lose control of his power for the tests. Perhaps that was because of the power itself, in the same way Sophia's power had shaped her, Maria lived in a constant state of flux and, well, he'd already been obsessed with making things long before any genetic tampering. Although who knew, really.

That way lay paranoia.

The thought of trying to approximate her, of trying to force a new soul into that mold, treating it as just a replacement made him sick enough that he had to wonder, although that might be Sophia's feeling spilling over from the way she was crying now. He'd absently opened an arm for her, still staring at where Ryoko had been.

Did it count as mind control when he didn't really mind? He might have been uselessly in shock right now, otherwise. Or desperately trying to set up programs to search and find, trying fruitlessly to revive her and putting his fingerprints all over everything and making people wonder what he was up to that was slowing down all the servers. No, it was probably because of Sophia that he'd known instantly just how gone she was.

That could have been him.

It was _supposed to be _him.

He was the reason they'd given Fayt this power, tested him and drugged him until they found a combination that would force him to use it, breaking his mental control, and a combination that would keep him from getting angry. They'd tapered him off that one, one of Ryoko's projects, but the damage had been done.

At least it was only drugs and chemicals. That he could fix. If Fayt's own power had gone to war with him, if he'd had to struggle for control, the power of destruction loose in his own brain? No, Fayt had too much control of himself for that.

That was why they had to make damn sure that Fayt never found out about this.

Hell. The things they'd dosed him with… It was a mercy the kid wasn't braindead, even if he was a denizen of the Sphere. A tribute to their competence. How much they'd studied up on what they were doing. How much care they'd taken of their son.

They'd done everything they could, to protect their son from what they'd done to protect him.

It still hadn't been safe.

There weren't medications for this kind of brain damage in the Sphere. It didn't _happen_, people were too resilient, what didn't kill them made them stronger.

They'd just wanted to make him stronger. Wanted to make him _survive_ what was coming.

This was entirely his fault, for not being able to find another way.

Although he couldn't blame himself for not anticipating this. No one had, no one could have. He was an artist, not a doctor.

Although fault or not, he knew damn well that this was his responsibility.

He'd have to start by deciding how much he was going to violate his principals by forcing another sentient being into the role of Ryoko Leingod (he'd have to look up what he'd done to make Mirage suited to her role without actually controlling her mind). No, he'd have to start by waiting for Sophia to stop crying, he couldn't undo the freeze until she was up to it. Then he'd have to try to adapt the medicines his search function had pulled up (for once he was glad that there was really no worthwhile research to be done on his world other than obscure diseases) for the Eternal Sphere.

He'd wanted to make this up to Ryoko. Apologize later, when it was _safe_, find some way for her to live her life over again, like Robert and the others, so they didn't have to suffer anymore because of fear and racism, because of… Because of the fact he might be their creator but he wasn't all-powerful. Because he'd had to deceive and terrify them in order to have a chance to save them.

And now she was dead. As dead as his grandparents were, because there was no afterlife in his world. Despite everything he'd done for his children one of them, one he'd been watching over personally had just died, not gone on to the next life but _died _right there in front of him, and all he could do was sit here uselessly!

Why did he think he could do this, again? Why did he think he could pull this off, why did he think that he could save any of them?

No, he knew the answer. Because there was no one else. Because he had to. Because if he failed it wouldn't just be Ryoko.

All of them would be wiped out, every server and disc wiped clean.

He really couldn't tell Blair. She'd try to help, and this was what happened to people who got caught up in this.

* * *

_As a general rule, it's not a good idea to fuck with the brain (the exception, of course, being when it's already messed up and the idea is to mess it up in a less bad way). Hallucinogens… consuming LSD can be described as enjoying watching the pretty colors of the funeral pyres of your burnt-out brain cells. And the damaged parts generally remain damaged. It's possible to suddenly have a flashback and start hallucinating again years after taking LSD._

_Because even if they didn't go and save Robert Leingod, Ryoko Leingod should have been much more of a resource than she was. While this is fic character death, it's not game character death: the Ryoko of the game was the replacement Ryoko, an entirely different person._

_Immense godlike powers are extremely dangerous. There's an anecdote about someone asking George Lucas why Luke's hand got cut off, and his answer was that that's what happens when people fight with swords. If you give this kind of power to anyone, especially children, someone's going to get hurt._

_And I already had Sophia's and Maria's powers do… very creepy stuff that I hope conveys the fact that they're damn scary. Sadly, Fayt's power isn't something that can partially destroy something, or have it not actually be that bad. The point of this chapter is that yes, the genes are just that goddamn powerful and dangerous. Dr. Leingod is a genius and he was out to kill an eldritch abomination. As the game showed, the genes were _overkill_. Serious, serious overkill._

_Saturn killed Uranus, his father. So, he was cursed to be killed by his son, Jupiter, who was therefore cursed to be killed by his son… Except Minerva/Athena._

_My apologies for all the red herrings in the fic. I wanted to create a bit of normal life/fog of war, set up all the blatant foreshadowing but not have it be quite predictable/controllable. Luther is having to deal with life as the admin of the Sphere/Owner of Sphere Company, Ashton the young soon-to-be professor with colleagues and contacts… and his responsibilities as the Creator and dealing with three young AI with powers comparable to those of gods. He may be recently ex-human himself, but power doesn't necessarily come with any idea how to use it, forget omniscience. The Omniscient Morality License trope is being averted here. It's not very nice to lie to people and allow them to be terrified, but he's just doing the best he can. And frankly, he's put himself in the most danger of all. In the game, remember how the party came away with the impression that basically the only reason the 4ders were being mean was that they thought they were things, and all the ones who realized they were people were nice and helpful, and the Creator was kind of nuts, so this wasn't exactly normal? Whearas the real reason 4d should have had a problem with the Sphere was because they were people, and hence dangerous? He's using himself as the lightning rod, setting himself up as the target/villian of the piece, because otherwise, 4d's government would have gotten involved, and it really would have been humans vs. AI, the AI convinced they needed to wipe out humanity just to survive. _

_So Dr. Leingod's target is him, specifically, and then, well, there are a lot of people in 4d who care quite a bit about the Sphere, and not all of them are going to be as patient about it as Blair. I'm sure series fans can think of a certain person who will in fact try to kill him. And that's on top of what will happen if anyone finds out what he's really trying to do. In trying to save two universes, he's basically put himself in a position where _everyone_ in both universes will/could want him dead, either because they think he's trying to destroy the Sphere or they realize that he's actually trying to save it (and betraying humanity). _

_Think about the fact he thinks it's too dangerous to have anything to do with Maria in terms of that. Two universes out to kill him: acceptable risk. Maria: unacceptable risk. The genes are serious business._


	8. Suns' Day

_Sun's Day again._

_Last chapter/oneshot/thingy for now, since I have way too many unfinished projects on my hands to start yet another epic, but I do intend to get back to the universe eventually because there are scenes in my head that make me grin. This is more of a postscript than a real chapter: my apologies, but that was how it turned out/I want to get this wrapped up. The sooner I get stuff off my plate, the sooner I can get to the real/major Star Ocean 3 fic? The fic begins and ends with 'family bonding,' one appropriate to 'real life' but done with 'game characters,' the other gaming but done with 'real' people. I like the bookends._

_Ah: keep in mind that this is several upgrades/rule changes/level cap raises… Well, the MMO thing gives a justification for all the gameplay changes between the different Star Ocean games, and even the remakes could be those events happening in a different timeline, one 'after' a few upgrades from 4d's perspective. Of course, the Eternal Sphere in-universe is far more realistic/immersive than any of the games we've played, obviously, and the gameplay would reflect that._

_I really don't think that real!Blair's combat style would be much like fake!Blair/the Sphere's combat style, by the way. For one thing, since she's studying it she's probably tried out most of the game's combat styles, or at least the ones the players use, and second there's the entire way she approaches the problem of Luther. Favored play style ideally has a lot to do with personality/what people think is effective. Well, provided the game has decent balance._

* * *

It had been what, years, since he'd played with a controller or a computer keyboard, he thought as he sent his character/combat form running out of range of an area effect technique in the opposite direction Blair was. He was surprised that he didn't seem to be rusty at all, but then he was the one who had designed the Eternal Sphere's control scheme: maybe it was just that it was intuitive to him.

It was a pity he couldn't do this battle in what had become the 'normal' way for him, with his mind in what had become a second, or third, body, but he'd been doing a little too much training in case of more invasions like that last one. It wouldn't do for some automatic flicker of will to call up a shield, start dropping bombs on top of the enemy or anything like that.

Not that Blair, testing out one of the Federation's latest weapon models (although using some decidedly non-Federation-standard ammo), wasn't doing a good job of dropping bombs on the bonus boss' head. Well, and Azazel's, but Luther had already got him shielded. Honestly, he had to wonder why Azazel always chose close-combat 'tank' characters, even though that wasn't an effective tactic in the real world. Perhaps it was wish fulfillment, perhaps it was an extension of his ethos as a security officer, bodyguard, whichever. It was certainly hard for the bonus boss to do much to hurt either of the other two when it was stun locked half the time.

Which would be making Luther's character build comparatively useless if he hadn't skewed it more towards black mage/summoner than he normally did when he was dealing with a party. Blair and Azazel were far more competent and less likely to need healing than the typical party, even if Azazel was, as always, quite willing to take damage to accomplish the objective.

Honestly, the medic/white mage/healer/whatever type was always the most effective, which was probably he kept nerfing them enough so that from his perspective they were somewhat balanced and from the average player's perspective he'd made them almost useless. It wasn't just that while there was life there was hope, it was that it didn't matter how much damage the enemy did to you if they couldn't make you stay damaged. It was always amusing in PvP, when he _did _PvP, to see the look on their faces when they realized he'd just been toying with them, all along.

Not that he'd created an anonymous account to do that with in awhile. It was really unfair unless there was someone he was scouting.

Which was why Blair had roped him into this, really. All work and no play was making Luther an antisocial shut-in, which as his sister she wasn't going to just stand by and let happen. Which itself was all part of the plan, he mused as his summon activated and he waited until he could heal Azazel again, considering following that up with a buff. That was another nice thing about the healer/summoner type for a party leader: in order to heal, you had to be paying attention to their status constantly anyway, so it only made sense for the strategist to take that position. Two birds with one stone. Not that he had to do much strategizing, forget any commanding, with _this _party, but in a few years he might be handling graduate student research assistants in the field, if he couldn't swing doing it solo, and then there was going to be the _real _fight.

Well, for a certain value of real. Hopefully. Because if things went wrong it would end up 'for real' in all sorts of nasty ways.

For something that Blair had intended as a social occasion, there was very little party chatter. Well, the difficulty level had something to do with that, in Blair's case. Azazel was acting like a focused professional, and he was thinking.

It wasn't that Blair wasn't good, far from it, it was that she was a researcher for a reason. When she had a shiny problem, or in this case a mottled-green draconic problem, she'd focus in on it. She was nowhere near as bad as him when it came to forgetting to multitask, but she was pretending that this was just a normal little 'family outing,' where the point wasn't to watch him, it was to blow a bonus boss to smithereens. And, you know, collect data and test it for the players and all that stuff because they were responsible people doing their jobs. The fact that this involved playing a video game at work was just one of those things that happened when you'd won at life, he thought, and smirked. He could just see her saying something like that. Not where anyone would hear, obviously, because that would just be mean.

He was going to miss this. Not the battles like this one, because he doubted that the Eternal Sphere would be completely safe once the worlds were divided (hadn't Freya proved otherwise?), but the battles with these people.

…Maybe he could shanghai Blair? She wouldn't mind, probably, once she stopped yelling at him/started speaking to him again for not telling her earlier. Nah, that wouldn't be a big problem, he'd just let Sophia and Fayt at her. Why fight a battle himself when he had party members so perfectly suited to it?

No, it really wasn't fair to make that decision for her, and he doubted he'd be able to ask her safely, even in the last moments. There'd be too much going on, too much that could go wrong.

So he needed to enjoy these moments while he had them, he knew as Azazel's light show of a technique started up, and not act like he was mourning them or saying goodbye. There were years to go, after all.

Years of days like this, and days like the one he would be having as soon as this was done, taking Fayt and Sophia to the university bookstore because Fayt had saved up his allowance for a book on dinosaurs.

In most games, even if the fate of two universes hung in the balance either there was all the time in the world or you were steamrollered along to some inescapable fate. He'd thought that having to take it day by day like this, juggling two lives and two universes' worth of lives would be exhausting, but there were days where something went catastrophically wrong and days like this. Days when everything came together like a well-oiled machine and days when he just got to hang out.

Because it wasn't a robot apocalypse or cosmic horrors crushing a helpless world: he wouldn't let it be.

It was just… people, and days like this.

Family… and setting a new speed record for defeating this boss.

Yeah, he thought to himself as Blair came over for a high-five, he'd better make sure she didn't think he was a lost cause, actually, because she'd be one bitch of a final boss if she ended up getting serious.

Well, that was an excuse not to have to cut all ties with her.

For now, at least.

Well, if that was what it took, that was what it took. "Do you want to head further in, since we're already here?" he asked them.

Why not? There was time.


End file.
